tashina knight

Keep an eye out next year for the new Sonia King book - Mosaic Masterclass: Advanced Techniques. It is being cowritten by Emma Biggs, founder of the London Mosaic Workshop.

Above is a detail from an installation for the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.

I believe I’ve mentioned Michelle Griffoul before here. She is an artist who makes her own tile for residential and commercial installations. I was at a tile store somewhere near Mission Bay in San Diego in 2002 and saw her tile in person for the first time and took these photos. This is part of the floor of the tile store. The fish tile are hers as well as the square field tiles.

Each tile is hand cut. You can see how they are made by going to her site and clicking on process on the left. As part of my continuing interest in self-taught versus university educated artists, Michelle has an MFA in Ceramics and studied in Florence as well.

I thought I’d introduce you to one of my favorite mosaic artists and one of my favorite ceramic artists.

Above and right is work by Irina Charny, a brilliant mosaicist from California. She is self-taught. I admire the way she seemingly effortlessly mixes her media. One piece may have pebbles, glass, mirror, ceramic tile, beads, buttons, and found objects. In the detail at right, she is mixing flower millefiori in with the flower shapes that she’s cutting out of the glass. I love the little whimsical bee.

She grew up in Russia and came to America in 1975. She’s been making mosaics since she was a child. You may remember a couple of posts ago, I said I was never one of those people that knew what they wanted to be as a child. How lovely it would be to play with making collages and making mosaics as a child and just continue to improve and make a career of it.

Below is the ceramic artist David Stabley. Here’s a peek in the studio that he works in with his wife. His work is based on dreams. He has an MFA so he is “professionally taught”. It’s so interesting to me, the different paths people take to become artists. I was a math major and never took an art class til after my bachelor’s degree. I spent 6 months in London after college and started painting in the small room I rented in Islington. When I came home and told my parents I was going to be an artist, you would have thought I’d told them I was moving to the moon. It wasn’t until I had my first piece in the paper (that they could show to all the relatives) that my father finally decided having an artist daughter wouldn’t be a disaster.

I like how he incises lines into the clay. I intend to work that way myself. It reminds me of my favorite furniture artist, Sarah Grant from Sticks, who does the same thing in wood. Here’s a Sticks piece that I particularly like done in a similar technique.

In honor of the 4th of July, here’s a Sticks US Flag:

Well, not the greatest photo of my art I’ve even taken, but this is the sort of thing I’ve been working on in my little hotel room. I really want to be learning to make handmade tiles at the moment, but I don’t think they’d appreciate a kiln in my room. Especially since there was a small fire here a couple days ago.

I have a small fear of fire in buildings, enough that I don’t light candles indoors and if it were left up to me, I don’t need a fireplace in my house either. The apartment I lived in 10 years ago almost burned down due to the carelessness of my next door neighbor. I heard a lot of banging in the next apartment at about 1am. Her bedroom and my bedroom shared a wall. I wasn’t quite asleep yet and wasn’t about to sleep with all the banging. I am a pretty quiet person, but in this case I decided to bang on the wall with my fist. Ineffectual….didn’t make a sound. So I figured I’d get up and get a broom to tap the wall with. I turned on the light and immediately saw smoke pouring into the room through the electrical outlet on that wall. I grabbed the bird cage and some clothes, called 911 and was out the door. Turns out the woman had been burning a candle - she had placed it on her printer and left paper in the printer. Need I say more? THEN, she had gone out to the bar downstairs and left the candle burning. It gutted her apartment - structurally still okay, but all her belongings were burned to a crisp and she had no insurance so red cross helped her out. She didn’t seem upset about it, more like “oh well, these things happen”. Our apartment smelled bad for a while and the stuff the firefighters sprayed on the wall to dissipate the smell ruined a lot of my polymer clay jewelry but other than that we were okay. I was just glad I was awake, because none of our wired-in smoke detectors ever went off. I actually think they were fire detectors not smoke detectors, because to prove they worked, my landlord held a match up to them and they went off, but they didn’t go off when our house filled with smoke. Test your detectors!!

The fire this week was on the floor below me and was a cooktop fire. It didn’t spread beyond the one room, but brought back bad memories! We all had to evacuate the building and sit outside in the Texas heat while the firemen went in with their axes. Now, how did I get on that topic?

Oh yes, tiles and kilns…I’ve always loved Michele Griffoul’s work. Look at her pool installation! So, I hope to make something like this but in my own style. And, of course, that’s on top of the watercolors I’m trying to learn and the acrylic paintings and the quilts and dolls I want to make, not to mention painting and decorating the new house! I need to be like a cat and have 9 lives!

The thing I’m most excited about in the new house is my art studio! We looked for a home with a large game room that I could make into a studio and found one with a 16′ x 21′ open room that was just perfect. I can look out over the first floor from the room and keep an eye on the second floor too. For some reason I’ve never been able to do art in a closed room. In our last house I had a small bedroom to do art in, and I just used it for storage and I ended up making things sitting on the couch in the living room! Here’s a picture of the room during framing last week… and next to it is the photo of the room in the model (from the opposite side).

I can’t wait til it’s done and I’m out of this hotel room. I measured my hotel room and it’s about the same size as the game room.

Hopefully, coming this week, one of my new and upcoming craft books posts.