Noodle Head to Rubber Feet: Tile Mosaic by Feral Willcox

Hello fellow Kitchen and Residential Design followers! My name is David Nolan, and I will be understudy for today. It is quite a privilege to be writing for Paul's blog, and a somewhat daunting task as this is my first post on any blog and I am the first of a series of more experienced guest authors. I hope for your sake they are all less nervous and more entertaining than me.

Today I decided to do an artist profile on my good friend and neighbor, Feral Willcox. Unfortunately, we are only exploring her tile mosaic work because I can't possibly cover all of the creative outlets Feral pours her energy into - ceramics, sculpture, mandalas, music, gardening - in one post.

Feral and I have enjoyed a friendship for years, and now I enjoy her creative side more as I regularly visit her studio/living space, which is conveniently located on the other side of our shared house. Our unique living situation with our landlady next door reminds me of Paul's symbiotic friendships with his former neighbor-down-the-hall Brandon (Where the Sweet Olive Grows) and his former next door neighbor Kevin (The Restless Sybarite).
Good friends are wonderful to have, especially close by.


First things first, Feral on Feral:

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, and everything I do begins with the letter P: Pottery, Poetry, Piano, and Pen-and-Ink. In all of these mediums, I'm most interested in Pattern. I'm a pattern junkie. I look for it everywhere I go. In ceramic art, this has led me to work with tile mosaic, and, in three-dimensional ceramic art, to explorations in surface design and texture.



The first project I saw Feral working on was a large pool back splash for a gorgeous home here in Gainesville, Florida. I had seen pictures of the tile layout previously but when you see a monstrous installation like this up close and in person, the effect is overwhelming and disconcerting at first. Then your brain slowly grows accustomed to the myriad of shape and color, and you start to breathe again.

If you click on this picture or any below, you will see the details of the tile and pattern.

Each ceramic tile was individually rolled, cut, glazed and fired by Feral. The brightly colored glass tile in the orderly arcs are by Karen Story at Dolce Glass Tile . The combination of textured earth-toned ceramic and smooth jewel glass interact well rather than clash. I imagine that once the pool was filled, the reflective quality of the water surface would only add to the playful chaotic beauty of the mural.

The detail picture below is just the tile laid out on a white backing, without grout.

The homeowners later commissioned Feral for a second mural for an exterior wall by the outdoor showers. This privacy wall can also be viewed from the master bathroom, bringing joyful color inside the home as well.

my favorite detail picture below

This last photo was taken of a handsome tile backsplash Feral created for some friends in California. It is called "Trees Sneeze" for obvious reasons. Feral was in California teaching ceramics at a school in Los Olivos -The Dunn School - and some of the tile installation was done by her students as part of their education.

If you are interested in learning more about Feral's incredible work, she can be reached at feralann (at) yahoo (dot) com. Her ceramic sculpture and pottery are featured in a local artist cooperative gallery here in Gainesville, called The Artistan's Guild. Stop in and see her work, in addition to 50 other area artists, if you are ever in our beautiful city.

Hasta luego

OK gang, by the time you read this I'll be well on my way. I'll resume posting on 17 August but that certainly doesn't mean that nothing's going on here while I'm gone. I have eight guest bloggers lined up and they represent as many different walks of life as they do different locations. There's a kitchen designer from Honolulu, a biologist from Pennsylvania, an American expatriate from Buenos Aires, a professional writer from New York, a professional writer from Miami, another biologist (this one's from Gainesville, FL), a waiter from New Orleans and an art historian turned writer and soon-to-be architect from the Midwest. I'm grateful of course and thrilled at the idea that all of this is going to unfold over next nine days and I won't see any of it until I get back. Stay tuned, be supportive, leave comments and have fun!

Twitter really is worth something. Really.

I have been using Twitter for about two months now and despite my initial misgivings, I've really come to enjoy it. I've made some tremendous contacts through it and Twitter has introduced me to a whole host of people from around the world I'd have never met otherwise. It's worth exploring Twitter, really. Besides, it's not going anywhere because it's what the future looks like. In addition to meeting some folks who are up to some really cool stuff, it's also becoming a great source of topics for this blog. Here's a list, and by no means an exhaustive one, of some of the interesting Twitter folk I've come across.

• I met Jake Gevorgian recently. Jake's a cabinet maker and SketchUp aficionado based in LA and he makes some beautiful, beautiful things.
  
  
• Alex Brooks is another great Twitter find. Alex maintains a renovation and design blog, Renovation Planning, from Sydney, NSW. Alex is also a regular contributor to and blogger for The Sydney Morning Herald, among other publications. I love reading design blogs from parts of the world other than the one I call home.
  
  
• Vicente Wolf started following me last week. I nearly choked when I got the notice. Vicente Wolf? Following me? Vicente also writes a blog, Vicente Wolf Blog.
  
  
• Linda Merrill is another member of the pantheon of great American Designers I've met through Twitter. Linda is a friend of the great Joni Webb (who's also a Twitterer). I don't think either of those women are aware of the influence they've had over me and it's a treat to correspond with them.
  
  
• Marie Cole is a designer who's pioneering the new venture known as online design. She's designing remotely and she's doing it full time. I've done it a couple of times and it's a fascinating idea. I'm glad to see that there are people out there making a go of it.
  
  
• Pam Rodriguez is doing what I fantasize about, she designs kitchens and baths and sells nothing but her designs. She also puts together design presentations for other designers and builders. She's pretty funny too.
  
  
• Given Campbell is a Tampa-based wallpaper designer and artist. Her work's being hailed wildly and you need to look through her website if you want to see wallpaper realizing its full potential.

Of course, there many others I've met and even more I've yet to meet. Give it a try some time and when you do, you can find me as @saintpetepaul.

Magnetic mosaics, how cool is this?

At the end of last month, the great kitchen designer and blogger Ann Porter wrote a post about a magnetic mosaic made by an Australian company called Motifo. If you don't read Ann's blog, KitchAnn Style, you ought to. Ann's also on Twitter as @KitchAnn_Style.

Motifo sells a kit of 25mm x 25mm (a little less than an inch by an inch) tiles and there are enough tiles in the kit to cover a space 70cm wide by 190cm tall (that's about 27 and-a-half by 75-or-so inches). The kits come in two color palettes; classic (gray tones) and warm (warm, sunset colors) and any kit can make any pattern you see here. Any kit can also make any pattern they offer on their website. So when you're tired of Edvard Munch's The Scream, spend a little time and reconfigure it to be Kylie Minogue (it IS an Australian company after all).

The kits are sized to fit the front of an Australian refrigerator. US and Canadian fridges are a great deal larger, so you won't be able to cover yours completely. But why limit yourself to the front of a fridge?

This puts the P in PSA

This video was making the rounds across the wide expanse of the Internet yesterday and it hits on a topic I haven't barked about in far too long. I'll get to that in a sec, in the meantime, get a load of this:

The ad's playing on Brazilian TV right now and translated into English it reads something like this:

Pee in the shower! We want everyone to do it! Men! Women! Children! Brazilians! Or not! Nobles! Commoners! Musicians! Sports stars! People half-human, half-monster! Twilight creatures! Brazilian legends! Greek legends! Good people! Not so good people! Artistic geniuses! Scientific geniuses! Circus performers! Lovers! People from other planets! Movie stars!

To sum it up: If you pee, we want you to do it too! (when you flush you waste up to 12 liters of drinkable water / 4380 liters in one year)

Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic Forest.

This ad was produced by Saatchi and Saatchi for the SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation, a non-profit, non-political foundation dedicated to the preservation of the Atlantic Forest. The Atlantic Forest is a unique, enormous forest that encompasses an area that includes coastal Brazil and Uruguay and then extends inland to Paraguay and northernmost Argentina. The Atlantic Forest surrounds some of Brazil's major population centers. It's a fragile, wildly productive ecosystem and Brazilians are right to be concerned about how their activities impact this region.

Like everywhere else in the developed and developing world, urban Brazil has water problems. One of the many reasons countries around the world are having water problems is the omnipresence of the flushing toilet. Wise resource use is a bit of a hot button issue of mine. Unfortunately, so much of the "greening" of the world is a marketing campaign that really doesn't accomplish a whole lot. Using less water is hard to make a lot of money from, so it tends to get overlooked. The US leads the world in household water consumption (no surprise there) and the EPA estimates that on average, 27 % of the 400 gallons of potable water consumed by an American household gets flushed down toilets.

I for one would like to applaud the the SOS Mata Altantica Foundation for making what's not a bad idea to begin with palatable to the masses. Well, the Brazilian masses at any rate. Can you imagine something like this showing up during commercial breaks for American Idol? Not bloody likely.

Peeing in the shower would save at least a flush per person per day. It doesn't sound like much but that's 1.6 gallons with a modern, efficient toilet. It's up to seven gallons on an older toilet. Those kinds of changes add up. So whattya say? Who's ready to xixi no banho?