Sunday, August 9, 2015

Mosaics



I had a great time
Learning I am not good at
Making mosaics.
Mounting hardware
Last weekend I met S's Seattle girlfriend. She was visiting him and teaching a workshop in the barn: she's a mosaic artist and teacher, vibrant and talented. She has been pursuing her passion for 10 years, after 20+ years of working as an administrator at UW. I am impressed by her, but I don't think we like each other. There is some sort of constraint, and I find myself wondering why S prefers her. Perhaps because she doesn't seem to need him? He still thinks I'm lonely and seeking, and he does not like being a port in the storm. But, he does like being surrounded by talented, extroverted and attractive women, and we do have that in common.

Because I could not afford the workshop fee, S asked her if I could audit the class. She very kindly agreed, and eventually I was tapped to be the minion-assistant. That suits me: I like being in on the ground floor of any activity, knowing what goes into it, acting, not just receiving. It was not much work, and made me feel like less of a mooch, which I suspect was the purpose.

I arrived the night before, driving in through an incredible lightning storm and gully washer around Cerrillos. Ditches and arroyos that had never been damp in my experience were filled with muddy roiling waters, and the sky was filled with jagged vertical bolts and cloud-defining flashes of light. I stopped by WEC to pick up some mail and watched the show with C before going into it. We talked of M's condition and E's new home, but I could not focus on anything but the skies. That alone was worth the trip south. I reached S's home safely and curled up on the porch, listening to the muttering of thunder in the distance and the crackling of crickets in the garden. I thought about the past few years, and wondered how I had arrived at this place: a welcome guest everywhere, but at home nowhere. I'm not lonely, per se, but I am restless and unproductive. I like exploring activities and places, and I like learning, but I don't connect with any of it.

The mosaic workshop is a case in point. This was a class in using thinset as substrate, set, and design element. We learned how to mix and color the thinset, and we learned how to set various kinds of tesserae: small polished basalt pebbles, acid-washed glass gems, broken pieces of travertine, crushed pyrite. We weren't making art, but creating a techniques board. However, most of the students are experienced in mosaic, so they did create art.

I did not. I discovered that I am too slapdash for that sort of art. It's fun to play with beautiful found and prepared objects, but I don't think I'll ever be able to put them together in a coherent fashion. And, I prefer art with a more instant gratification: taking a photo, playing with it in photoshop, printing it up. Mosaic requires a vision, and if you make a mistake, you chip the whole thing out and start again. The thinset has a memory, so you can't just pull out a tessera and place something else once the tessera and thinset have bonded.

It's a very easy life metaphor, of course. You build your mosaic, piece by piece. Some pieces don't fit the pattern, and you can't just replace them, you have to replace the whole darn adhesive as well as the tessera. You break things to create your tesserae. You cure your adhesive, and your adhesive has a pot life, so you throw it away when it can no longer bond properly. The whole process is detailed and precise, and mistakes cannot be covered over. They have to be recognized in the effect they have on the pattern, and they have to be dealt with. Sometimes the whole pattern is a mess, ill-conceived and ugly. Sometimes it's just not what you wanted. K once chipped out an entire section because it was perceived as representational, and she is trying to solve some other visual problem.

And this is why mosaic art is not for me, and it's probably why I'm in this restless place. I've broken so many things, and I've picked up those pieces and set them in place, but the adhesive is not bonding because I didn't do the prep work, or the design is flawed because I didn't think about it, and I just want to walk away from the mess. I don't want to chip away and start over: that is too painful a process, and it will further destroy the pieces I've tried to rescue. Besides, I don't know what pattern I want. I recognize the beauty in the individual pieces, and I like watching the way they interact, but when I try to put them together, I am not happy with the result.

So, I'm restless.