Sorry another late post...or rather an early morning post. Yesterday was a day full of surprises. My art history class was taking a field trip to go see a local Mosacists (don't know if thats a word, but basically a person who does mosaics) studio. Jean Pierre is a man who works for the college and he also has his mosaic business on the side. Now I know what your thinking, because I was thinking the same thing...mosaics.???pretty small tiles made into pictures, not terribly interesting. Boy was I wrong! His studio was amazing. It had to have been an old barn turned into two separate viewing spaces. One is the workshop where he actually builds the pieces and the other is where he displays the finished works. The cool thing about Jean Pierre is he normally doesn't go out and buy tiles or pieces of marble or rock to make his works, he find the things he wants right from the Earth of Southern France. In particular, he looks for old pottery, marble, stone from the Roman period. Which is very prevalent in this area because it is a valley in which multiple empires have been built, one on top of the other, and on top of the other. So it is not unusual to find artifacts or pieces of rock from the Roman Empire after a heavy rain storm!
So we visited his studio and saw unbelievable art. And I am serious, I would love one these mosaics, but I am positive I could never afford them. Its interesting too how Jean Pierre works on these mosaics. Here is my short explination of it, so if your not interested in how mosaics are made, skip to the next paragraph...it won't bother me !! :) So he finds all these ancients stones and marbles and the first things he does is cut them into baguettes (I didn't know. but the French word baguette is actually not the bread...it means stick!) with a water powered diamond saw. Then he takes each baguette and places it on a hammer anvil and hammers out all the little pieces or shape that he needs. Next his design is drawn out on paper and labeled with the appropriate shapes and colors. Then he just begins to fill in the picture, like a giant coloring book. He uses wood glue to stick the tiles to the paper. If it is a large piece, sometimes he will outline each major shape with a piece of iron, (Like in stain glass making) but he has moved away from that as much as possible, because it is not aesthetically pleasing. So after all the pieces are in place and they are glues down, he sets them in a metal frame and pours about an inch of concrete on top. That way if the stones are different sizes or thicknesses the will all be flat on the bottom. After the concrete is dried, he carefully flips the design and sands away the paper. And there you have it, a mosaic table. He covers the surface of the mosaic with beeswax so that it plugs all the holes. And let me tell you it is a amazing!
We toured his working studio and all of his "portfolio pieces" and then got invited to see his house and have "pain au chocolat" (yummy chocolate mini crossaints) with tea and coffee. His house was very quaint and he has a bunch of treasures just from living in the Provence area. Like a stone necklace from the BC era and some neolithic tools. Becuase of all his hunting for old stone, he comes across some pretty interesting things digging in the ground!
The rest of my day was pretty uneventful. I am still trying to get a Barcelona trip together. It will be a short one if I decide to go, but fun none the less. I am pretty set in going to Nice and the French Rivera in three weeks. And next week we will be in PARIS!!! That is going to be a great trip and we leave on Wednesday morning, very, very, very early. Otherwise classes are going pretty well. I have a paper for art history I need to finish this weekend (crossing the fingers that I get that done) And I have a litho print due on Monday, which is coming out okay....not exactly how I would like my print to come out, but oh well. And Sunday is the first ever Sidewalk Art Festival!!! I will be posting a lot of pictures from there! Hope things are going well and I will post later after the corkscrew museum trip this afternoon!
More Pictures In:
http://s302.photobucket.com/albums/nn109/sarapitz/Mosaics/
No comments:
Post a Comment