This post ran originally on 23 May 2009 and I STILL think it's funny. I hope the New Zealander behind this brilliant idea's still plugging away at her art somewhere.
I love these plates.
I mean, how can you not?
Clever and deliciously subversive, aren't they?
These plates are the handiwork of an artist who calls herself Trixie Delicious. Aukland, New Zealand-based Trixie sells her wares (and ships worldwide) through a website called Felt. Felt is the Kiwi version of Etsy, a marketplace for a group of independent artists and artisans to sell their work.
Ms. Delicious takes vintage plates, platters, saucers and bowls and hand paints her messages of good cheer on them directly. She uses non-toxic, heat-fused, ceramic paint. This means that these delightful, heartwarming iconoclasms will last forever. Imagine the joyous faces around your table when you serve a Thanksgiving turkey from a Crackwhore Tray. That noise you hear is the sound of my heart growing three sizes from the thought alone!
Many thanks to Leona Gaita and her great blog Gaita Interiors for the tip off to these beauties. Spend some time this weekend getting to know Leona, I like her perspective.
When I was a kid, from time to time we'd pile into the station wagon and cruise down the Schuylkill Expressway, cross the Walt Whitman Bridge and visit our cousins in New Jersey. I enjoyed those drives and the highlight every time was how Philadelphia's Center City pops into view as you turn a bend in the highway. Just before that though, a museum I grew up calling the Parthenon in the Park rises on a bluff above the Schuylkill (it's pronounced skoo-kill) River.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art rises above the Fairmount Waterworks --photo via Flickr
The Parthenon in the Park is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the largest and best art museums in the US and it sits in the center of Fairmount Park, the largest urban park in the world. That museum started me on a lifelong appreciation for art. It was in that museum that I saw for the first time works by Rembrandt, el Goya, Caravaggio and the rest of the titans of western art. It was in that museum too that I first saw a Picasso, an Ellsworth Kelly, a Warhol and I first learned to draw the connections that link the modern to the ancient.
So it was with great surprise that last week I got an email from my friend Kevin who alerted me to a new exhibition that's starting this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's no secret that I love all things Alessi and yes, they're an advertiser. But what a great surprise to learn that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is mounting Alessi: Ethical and Radical from November 21st through April 10th, 2011.
Alessi has been busily revolutionizing industrial design since its founding in 1921 by Giovanni Alessi. Beginning in the '50s, Alessi started commissioning works by the great designers of the day. By that same time, the Alessi company had come under the direction of Giovanni's son Carlo Alessi.
Bombé Tea and Coffee Service (1945). Designed by Carlo Alessi. First produced in chrome-plated and silver-plated heavy brass, later in stainless steel, applewood. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Building on the work started by Giovanni and Carlo, Carlo's son Alberto Alessi has brought the company to what it is today. Under Alberto's watch, Alessi has brought in for collaborations such luminaries as Achille Castiglioni, Michael Graves, Greg Lynn, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck and Robert Venturi.
Sketch (1979), designed by Richard Sapper. Espresso coffee maker sketch. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alessi archives. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
(1979), designed by Richard Sapper. Espresso coffee maker. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Different from any other modern manufacturer, Alessi has offered its collaborators absolute creative freedom and technical support in a series of radical, experimental projects, whether or not the results could ever be brought to production.
Sketch by Michael Graves. Kettle with handle and small bird-shaped whistle. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
(1985), by Michael Graves. Kettle with handle and small bird-shaped whistle. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the designer. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Alessi: Ethical and Radical includes objects, drawings, videos, and photographs that demonstrate the company’s unique approach to design and unique way of working with its designers.
One of the greatest films ever made was 1945's tour de force Mildred Pierce. Joan Crawford had been let go by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and this was her first film for Warner Brothers. It netted her the only Oscar of her long and distinguished career.
Mildred Pierce is the ultimate film noir murder mystery. Under Michael Curtiz's direction, the movie's stellar cast wallows in 1940s glamor. The set design, the lighting, the wardrobes and yes the story are a compelling and fascinating watch. Joan Crawford could chew on scenery like none other and her larger than life portrayal of Mildred is matched line by line by Ann Blyth's over the top characterization of Mildred's horrific daughter Veda. Throw in Zachary Scott for beefcake and Eve Arden for comic relief and it's a winner all around.
Mildred Pierce was adapted from James M. Cain's 1941 novel of the same name. In order to get the film made, Warner Brothers altered the story pretty significantly. They downplayed the sexual carryings on and played up the violence. Cain's novel is as much about the Depression and Prohibition as it is about they dynamics of a hard working mother and an ungrateful daughter and neither of those topics get touched upon in the Warner Brothers film.
Over the weekend, I learned that HBO has remade Mildred Pierce as a five-part mini-series that will premiere in the spring of 2011. The cast looks interesting and there was enough material left out of Cain's novel to make a brand new Mildred Pierce. Kate Winslett play Mildred and it will take me a while to get used to seeing her as such I have to admit. Guy Pearce plays the penniless playboy Monty and that's some great casting.
What give me hope for this movie is that it's being directed by Todd Haynes.
Todd Haynes made 2002's Far from Heaven, a movie I say is the best film of the 21st century so far.
With Far from Heaven under his belt, he proved that he can handle a period piece. And how. Wow, that movie is as beautiful to look at as it is devastating to watch.
So I'll be curious to see what Kate Winslett does with the character of Mildred Pierce and even more curious to see what Haynes does with Can's novel. What ever happens, get ready for a 1940s revival to counter the current craze for all things Mid Century Mad Men.
This post ran originally on 13 June 2009. Oh me oh my do I love art history and I'd forgotten all about this fantastic video. The point of my weekend re-runs is to give a second chance to some of my old material and bo-baby does this video need to be seen again.
Check this out. Someone posted this on Twitter this week and I've been watching it ever since. For the life of me I'm not exactly sure who posted it though. I think it was @leonagaita or @verdigrisvie though. If it were someone else I apologize and ladies, if either of you were the original poster, thank you.
I haven't gone off on an Art History tear in a couple of weeks and this video will do it for me. This thing's a brilliant, animated survey of the last 500 years of western portraiture. I love, love, love how this video's producer got to the 19th century and kept going up to the present. Far too often, people gloss over the last 100 years because they don't quite know what to do with it. That's unfortunate because even though it may not be immediately obvious, all art rests on the shoulders of the art that came before. This video drives home that point brilliantly and it does it in less than three minutes. Bravo!
If you're having trouble with this, follow this link. This video came from the great website GUBA, and it was posted by someone who goes by the name jun129. Thank you jun129.
I get hundreds of press releases and product announcements every week, it comes with the territory. That's not a complaint. Not at all. I welcome those things and I find they are the easiest way for me to keep up with what's going on in my field.
I received one yesterday from Flambeau Lighting and the release featured this photo.
I love it. I love the pendants, I love the room. I love how the stripes from the shade continue up the rods to the ceiling. Here's a close up of the pendant itself.
I've always loved black and white color schemes because they remind me of Tim Burton's work. In 1985 I saw a short film by an unknown filmmaker. The film was called Frankenweenie and it was Tim Burton's first movie. It was a Disney production, as hard as that is to believe. You can find it on YouTube these days. Anyhow, I was struck by the visual style of that movie, I'd never seen anything like it. Burton ended up getting fired from Disney over the film and the world owes Disney a debt of gratitude for their wise decision. Though I'm sure it was traumatic for Burton at the time, that firing unleashed a breathtaking talent on the world.
photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
Burton did a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art last year and it was cool to see how his style had evolved over the years and it was even more cool to see how much he'd held onto. Here's the ad MoMA put together while Burton's retrospective was running at the museum.
The pendant lights I started with have a Burton-esque feel to them and I like them all the more for it.
I'm particularly thrilled that Respighi's Pines of Rome is on deck for tonight, it's one of my favorite pieces of music and I have an attachment to it that defies my ability to describe adequately. As always, there's a story behind it but first a little background.
The Pines of Rome is the middle chapter in Respighi's three-part Roman Trilogy. He wrote his trilogy between 1915 and 1928 and each debuted as a separate work. The Roman Trilogy is Respighi's loving tribute to the sights, sounds and history of Rome. It's a work of mind numbing emotion and huge swaths of it leave me a babbling, weeping fool no matter how ofter I listen to this music. The first chapter in the trilogy is Fontane di Roma, the Fountains of Rome. The Second is I Pini di Roma and the the third is Feste Romana, Roman Festivals. Since the Orchestra's only playing the Pines of Rome tonight, I'll restrict my gushing to it.
Each chapter is broken into for sections and each describes a different scene. The Pines of Rome consists of I Pini della Villa Borghese (The Pines of the Villa Borghese), I Pini Presso una Catacomba (Pines Near a Catacomb), I Pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum Hill) and I Pini della Via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way).
This is the opening section, The Pines of the Villa Borghese. It tells the story of children playing army under the pine trees in the Villa Borghese near the Pincian Gate. Feel free to play this and keep reading.
Here's how my connection to this composition came to be.
In May of 2008 I was staying in a Roman neighborhood next to the Piazza Barberini. That's the lower arrow on this map.
The Piazza Barberini sits at the bottom of the Via Veneto and the Via Veneto starts at the Pincian gate. The Pincian gate is the upper arrow.
Here's Google's Street View of the gate.
I like to get up early and walk around when I'm visiting somewhere. One of the best ways to learn about a city is to watch it come to life in the morning. Rome has the added attraction of everyday life unfolding against a backdrop of truly ancient architecture. The Pincian Gate dates from the 5th Century and it was through this gate that Alaric and the Visigoths swarmed when they sacked Rome in 410. You know the expression "Barbarians at the gate?" Well, here's the place it referred to originally.
The Pincian Gate stands at the top of the Via Veneto and is one of the entrances to the Villa Borghese. The Villa Borghese is essentially Rome's Central Park and it's also the site where the Visigoths camped during their year-long siege of Rome.
So, it's now May of 2008 and it's a gorgeous spring morning and I'm taking a walk by myself. I'd loaded up an iPod with Italian music before I left the US and on that morning, Ottorino Respighi was my play list. I started listening to his Roman Trilogy and I was finishing up The Fountains of Rome when I approached the Pincian gate. What happened next was completely unplanned but as I stepped through the gate, I Pini della Villa Borghese started. Right in front of me I saw this.
That's my photo of the actual Pines of the Villa Borghese.
It hit me like a Mack truck that I was standing in the spot that inspired Respighi to write The Pines of the Villa Borghese. Since he'd written it around 84 years prior to my standing there, the odds were that I was looking at the very same trees he saw. I am not someone who's prone to losing control of his emotions. However, that realization, combined with the music I was was listening to was too much. I thought my head was going to explode as I burst into ecstatic tears and collapsed onto a low wall. I sat there for a while and listened through the rest of the Pines of Rome without taking another step. It was the wildest thing. It was as if I'd been given a private performance by the composer himself.
Hearing the result of a great artist's inspiration, whether it's a symphony or a banjo solo really gets my heart pumping. Better than other medium, a music invites you into an artist's world and then he invites you to stay. I get it that musical tastes are extremely subjective but no other musical form touches me quite the same way that a great, orchestral composition does. That a composer has an idea about how something might sound and then he goes out and creates the individual music for more than 100 instruments is an achievement of such stunning complexity it's hard to fathom.
Here's Respighi's entire Pines of Rome.
I Pini della Villa Borghese
I Pini Presso una Catacomba
I Pini del Gianicolo
I Pini della Via Appia
Now more than ever, community arts organizations, like my beloved Florida Orchestra, need your support. If you like the arts, whatever their form, patronize them. Go to the symphony, the ballet, the opera, a play. These organizations dedicate themselves the best humanity has to offer and they need your patronage to keep the lights on.
This is a series of pendant lights made by London-based Jake Phipps.
They're made from actual bowler and top hats and they take their name from an early '90s BBC show of the same name. By the way, the show starred now US TV star Hugh Laurie and current Twitter celebrity Stephen Fry.
Anyhow, any time I see a bowler hat I think of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. I like Magritte a lot and I've probably said so before on this blog. Here's why I have bowler hats and René Magritte linked so tightly in my mind.
Golconde, 1953
The Mysteries of the Horizon, 1955
The Son of Man, 1964
As much as I love his art, what I love even more was his perspective on it.
visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Words to live by if you ask me and not just a description of paintings.
So back to Jeeves and Wooster pendants, what do you think? Would you hang something like this in your home?
With apologies to the great Irving Berlin and his lyrics from Annie Get your Gun.
A man's love is mighty
It'll leave him buy a nightie
For a gal who he thinks is fun.
But they don't by pajamas
For Pistol packin' mamas,
And you can't get a hug
From a mug with a slug,
Oh you can't get a man with a gun.
Berlin Artist Yvonne Lee Schulz is putting Annie Oakley's words to the test with a series of hand-painted, porcelain pistols. While it's true they are tableware accessories, there's a lot going on here and what she has to say about gun violence isn't meant to comfort.
The Porcelain Pistols are replicas of James Bond’s Walther PPK and its contemporary sister, the P99,with friendly permission of Carl Walther Inc.The fragile weapon, hand-painted in the style of classic tableware motifs, liesnext to your coffee and cake, asking to be picked up. Its coolness andcomfortable grip increase the qualms of the user, leaving him in a quandary between the pleasure of luxury and violence.
Just as was the case with the graffiti china and china beer cans I've written about before, the heads up about these pistols came from the great David Nolan and his razor eye.
I love the idea of statement art being disguised as an everyday object and I would kill to see a tablescape blogger get her hands one a couple of these babies. What do you think? Too confrontational or not confrontational enough?
In an effort to reserve some weekend me time, I'm running posts from my archives on weekends for the time being. This post ran originally on 12 April '09 and it's an example of the many, many times that I abandon my niche and write about whatever I bloody well please. I fancy myself to be an art history buff and few things get me as excited as the Italian Renaissance. It's impossible to overstate the effect the Italian Renaissance had on human history but also on our culture today. The great minds behind the Italian Renaissance loom very large and their shadows are all around us today. You just have to know how to see them. Anyhow, here's an off-topic rant about one of my heroes, Michelangelo Buonorroti.
It's Easter and nobody wants to read about kitchen design today. So, I'm going to take advantage in the lull and run my mouth some more about the Renaissance. Indulge me.
The piece I wrote yesterday about the colorized ancient statuary got me thinking about the Italian Renaissance in general and Michelangelo Buonarroti in particular. Michelangelo sculpted his David in what was supposed to have been a commission to outfit the the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral with a series of 12 old testament figures. The block of marble it's carved from was already on site when the guild responsible for the commission was shopping for a sculptor. Many of the greats of the time were called in to look over the marble, including Leonardo Da Vinci, but no one really wanted to work with the piece of marble in question.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was 26-years-old at the time and he convinced the guild that he deserved the commission. He got it, obviously, and spent the next two years of his life bringing his David to life.
Michelangelo worked in the Mannerist style of the High Renaissance. A key concept in Mannerism is the exaggeration of the human form to make a statement. In addition to David being rendered in a Mannerist style, he's also in a Classically Greek heroic pose. He's standing in contrapposto, his body is turned and his weight is shifted back onto his right leg. This shift back throws David's spine into an S shape and the contrapposto is why David seems to be caught in mid-movement.
Contrapposto and implying movement didn't start with Michelangelo though. Here's a Classical Greek sculpture, the Doryphoros, from 400 BC. Michelangelo and the rest of the Renaissance greats would have studied the Doryphoros and other surviving statues from antiquity. Through their studies, they could recreate and re-interpret these classical forms to make something new and fitting for their own time.
Amazing. While I was rooting around the Internet and looking for images of David, I stumbled up a website that made a point I'd never considered. The site, Michelangelo's David Correctly Oriented is the work of J. Huston McColloch, an Economics professor at the University of Ohio.
When the David was completed, its unveiling was met with a hail of popular acclaim and it never made it up onto the buttresses of the cathedral where it was intended to go. Instead, it was put on display at ground level. It remained at the entrance to Florence's Palazzo Vecchio for several hundred years.
The David is a work of unquestioned genius and it's also a pretty powerful political statement. Unlike most depictions of the story of David and Goliath, Michelangelo's David is unique in that it shows the young man at the moment he decided to take on Goliath. David was usually shown after he'd slain the giant. So David, in contrapposto, is turning to face down his opponent. Make no mistake though, David is a political statement. Arguably, Michelangelo is using the character David to make a political point more than a religious one. David symbolizes the Florentine Republic as the Medici sought to defend themselves from the more powerful Borgias. Michelangelo's David = Cosimo Di Medici, Goliath = Caesar Borgia. Everyone who looked at this statue understood this and they also know how the biblical story turned out. No wonder it was so popular.
The David was moved into Florence's Galeria della Academia in 1873 and has been in that same position ever since. However, the view everyone sees today and the image everybody knows is actually the side view. McCulloch's site has this image of David in its proper orientation. Due to the size of the nave where the David's currently displayed, this perspective is impossible to see without the help of some digital imagery.
That certainly puts him in a whole new light. He looks menacing and poised to spring here and his movement is just not possible to see in the side view. Fascinating. David-as-Medici is easier to see from this perspective as well.
As I mentioned before, David is rendered in a Mannerist style. The Mannerists took liberties with the human form to make a point. Michelangelo made David's hands out of proportion with the rest of his body. David's hands are disproportionately large to show his intelligence and strength. Similarly, his musculature and symmetry are perfect beyond human standards. That's because David is a symbol of the best of humanity, he's not a representation of an actual person. David is an ideal. In typical Mannerist style too, his genitals are scaled down to the point where they indicate his maleness but don't distract. Mannerist, shrunken genitalia shout that this is a serious work, it's not erotica. Most amazing to me is that David's eyes are pointing in two different directions. Here's a close up of his face.
His left eye is looking into the distance, sizing up his opponent. But his right eye is looking down at the viewer. This isn't possible of course, but again it's Mannerist symbolism. David is sizing up his opponent and at the same time he's telling his audience that this is their fight too.
The David has so much going on with it that entire careers have been made out of studying it. But why is this important? Well, it's important because art doesn't happen in a vacuum. No human endeavor does. All human progress is based on the work, thoughts and ideas of the generations before. Henry Moore's work exists because Auguste Rodin's work came before. Rodin's The Thinker drew its inspiration from Michelangelo. Michelangelo carved his David because Polykleitos carved his Doryphoros. Polykleitos drew inspiration from the Egyptians and Persians. And so it goes back to the very dawn of humanity when an early Homo sapiens looked at his hand and decided to draw it on the wall of a cave.
I say this stuff important because it helps me keep my life and my ideas in perspective. The life I lead and the thoughts I have (and the life you lead and thoughts you have) are the direct result of everyone who came before me. Nothing's original. Not my life, not my thoughts, not my likes and not my dislikes.
So to sum it all up, does this look familiar?
This is an image of Hermes Kriophoros (the ram-bearer) from 500 BC.
Now where do you think this image below might have come from?
My great friend Tom Miller writes the blog Daytonian in Manhattan. Tom isn't an architect but he knows more about architectural history than anyone I've ever met. Tom's a 30-year resident of Manhattan and he's a consummate New Yorker. Every corner of that town has had something notable happen on it and I swear Tom knows every one of those stories. Last winter, he started a blog about Manhattan architectural history and five days he week he publishes a new story of a building.
On the 3rd of September he wrote a post called The House the Circus Built --10 St. Nicholas Place. And in his post he told a story of James Bailey. Bailey was the Bailey of Barnum and Bailey. Baily's home from 1880 is still standing and in a remarkable state of preservation. What caught my eye about it particularly were the stained glass windows it held.
The Bailey House featured windows made by the Belcher Mosaic Glass company and these windows are some of the last surviving examples of the Belcher Company's work.
A Belcher Mosaic window from the Bailey House
Belcher developed a new technique for making mosaic windows rather than the standard stained glass techniques used since the early middle ages. Rather than using lead cames between the individual pieces of glass, Belcher patented a process where he'd lay out the pattern of the window between two sheets of asbestos. Then he poured a molten lead alloy over the whole works. The molten alloy would flow between the pieces of glass and make a stable window.
This process allowed Belcher to use much smaller pieces than most stained glass windows use and he could use pieces of glass that were in regular, repeating shapes --triangles usually but sometimes squares.
The Belcher Mosaic Glass Company went out of business in 1880 and a handful of these windows survive. I think they're fascinating. Almost as fascinating as I find Tom's blog. Check it out and if you're ever in Manhattan and you need a tour guide, I know the best one out there.
One of the great joys of being a blogger are the connections I make with artists. Julie Richey is my favorite mosaicist working today and I met her through some work I was doing for the fine folks at Mosaic Art Now. Julie's become a pen pal, a Facebook friend, an occasional contributor to K&RD and a regular source of inspiration. Julie and I have never met in person, but one of these days we will. Hopefully, that meeting will take place in a trattoria in Trastevere where we'll dine on carciofi alla Giuda and pretend it's 2000 years ago.
Julie works in three dimensions as often as she works in the mosaicists' more traditional two dimensions and she sent me some photos of her latest piece the other day and I'm in awe of it. The piece is called La Corrente, which means The Current in Italian and it's her tribute to the Gulf of Mexico.
From Julie's statement:
My work utilizes the innate opulence of mosaic materials – 24k gold smalti, marble, semi-precious stones – to embellish sculptural forms in unexpected ways. The discovery of dentalia shells inspired the densly-packed and fragile under skirt.
La Corrente, (The Current in Italian) is about beauty amidst destruction. The sea kelp adorning her gown swirls in the strong gulf currents. Giant Asian Sea Kelp is an invasive species threatening the balance of plant and marine life in the region. While man overtly destroys the gulf with oil, pollution and fertilizer runoff, another destructive force creeps in with the current.
Here's the front of La Corrente.
And here it is from the back.
Dentalia are tusk shells, a common find along the shores of the Gulf, and she hand applied each one with tweezers. Here are some details photos.
And here's the finished piece in Julie's studio.
I'm awed by her ability to take an art form and push it in new directions. Mosaic is art and Julie's work proves that time and again. The sculpture as a whole tells a narrative that's moving enough, but the materials too pitch in to help tell the story. Much like the Gulf itself, underneath the beautiful form churns a gathering storm.
Brava Julie.
You can see the rest of Julie's work on her website and you'll be seeing more of this one. She's entered La Corrente in the 2011Mosaic Arts International and when it gets selected, it'll be on display at the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, TX beginning in mid-February, 2011. The photography featured in this post is by Dallas-based Stacy Bratton.
Julie's available for commissioned work (in two or three dimensions though she can probably handle four dimensions) and you can reach her through her website.
Trend USA, an Italian mosaic producer with offices around the world, announced a new process for making mosaics recently. It's something they're calling an elaboration, and to achieve it they use proprietary CAD-based software to assign colors and patterns to replicate in mosaic form photos, fabrics or other works of art.
Sometimes it's easier to show than to explain. So here's an image of a fabric.
And here's its elaboration as a Trend USA mosaic.
It's been assigned a different color way of course, but notice too that it's made with cut mosaic pieces. That's an ancient process for achieving rounded shapes called tessellatum tesserae. The same proces is sometimes called a cut mosaic. In addition to tessellatum tesserae, Trend USA's new process can be used to create mosaics using whole 3/8", 5/8" and 3/4" mosaic tiles as well.
In the example below, there's a photo in the top right corner. Below it are the full image of the photo as a mosaic created in 5/8" tiles and then there's a detail of the mosaic. I'm uploading these photos today in high resolution. Click on them and you'll see the detail. It's a small price to pay for the slower loading times.
Trend USA asked me to submit a photograph of my own to use as an example of this process. Trend USA is represented by a friend of mine and she's well aware of my near obsession with Fibonacci Sequences and she suggested that I submit an artistic example of one to use for my custom mosaic.
My favorite video of the last year is Nature by Numbers, a short film by Cristóbal Vila that uses three examples of natural geometry.
I have a still from Vila's film and so I sent this image to Samara Gould, Trend's Artistic Design Consultant. I wanted to test this new process, so I picked an image specifically because I thought it would be a challenge. The transparent wings alone would make me sweat if I were Samara. She accepted my image without hesitation. In fact, she was excited to give it a go.
I told her that I would love to see that dragonfly elaborated as a mosaic in a size somewhere around 10 feet wide by five feet tall.
Samara used 3/8" tiles and by using that smaller size, she created a mosaic that would be readable from four feet away. That's pretty good for something this large.
If I were to buy this dragonfly mosaic, it would come to me in sheets 28 tiles wide by 28 tiles tall and all my installer would have to do is take the sheets out of a box and attach them to my wall. That's pretty slick.
I've seen many custom mosaic services that use a computer to assign colors and patterns before, but I've never seen one that results in this level of detail and clarity. A process such as this is yet another reason to keep an eye on Trend USA and Trend Worldwide. Thank you Samara and thank you Trend.
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