Don't do this

A reader sent me some photos yesterday and asked me what I thought about them. Predictably, I had a fit. I have a feeling that's why she sent them to me. Here's a couple of them.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. No. No. No. A thousands times no. I've had a day to calm down and that's a close to a fit as I can muster today. I'm appalled, really. You know how I'm always running my mouth about making a home look like you live in it? Well, there's a limit to how far down that path I'm willing to go and I think this represents my limit.

My fist impulse is to mock this kitchen and the mind who came up with it, but that won't do anybody any good. So instead of mocking it, I'll be constructive. More or less.

The urge to make something personal and by hand is admirable. I mean, this person's heart was in the right place. With that said, this is still a butt ugly back splash in a cluttered mess of a kitchen. The media doesn't bother me, it's the sloppy execution. Here are a couple of close ups, look them over and I'll explain myself more.

What she did was make this back splash out of broken bits of china, colored glass and whatever else she had on hand. Again, there's nothing wrong with making a back splash from found objects. My issue is that this stuff's so haphazardly placed. Look how widely spaced the pieces are. There's no overriding theme to any of it, no attempt to say anything or tell a story. From a distance it looks like her walls are dirty and up close it looks like she was either in a hurry or didn't have enough pieces to cover the whole wall. I don't want to assign any motives to whoever's responsible, but it seems to me that she thought she was being original and clever in doing this to her kitchen. It's hardly an original technique.

She's standing on the shoulders of a master and is probably unaware of it. Had she been aware she could have studied the work of Antoni Gaudí and his mosaic masterpiece, the Parc Güell in Barcelona. Gaudí was a Spanish Art Nouveau architect and early modernist. In the Parc Güell, he made mosaics from broken pottery. He used the shattered pieces to make a whole that was unrelated to the original pottery. These mosaics look like sweeping, sinuous fields of color and shape from a distance. The individual pieces are only visible as pieces from close up. You can see Gaudí's process and thinking when you look at this work. It's the thought behind these mosaics that makes them great art. Here's a ceiling mosaic from the Parc Güell. It's followed immediately by a detail photo of the same ceiling mosaic.

Our crafty homeowner could have made great art too. Instead, she made a poorly executed craft project. I'm not saying she should have copied the Parc Güell's mosaics, but had she studied them she would have come up with a hand made mosaic that made some kind of sense. Instead, she got an eyesore that designers on the Internet can use as an example of that not to do. Art history is your friend folks.