News From My Studio, Revisions and Beginning to Cut the Pool House Mosaic

Hello and greetings from my ceramics studio!

Last November I began a large mosaic mural for a pool house here in Portland Oregon. This pool house is next to the Mermaid Pool Mosaic we made in 2016. This is a really fun and brief quicktime video of the installation of this detailed and huge mosaic in the bottom of the client's pool.

HT Pool from Ruth Greenberg on Vimeo.

In this photo of the Pool House under construction, the Mermaid mosaic is put together on the floor so the installers can take sections easily into the pool area as they installed it. If you look at the back wall, behind the tile saw, the area between the windows will be the home for the Pool House Mosaic once I've made it.

In my last post about this project, the size of the space where the mosaic will go was changed from 84" x 72" to 98-7/8" x 71-7/8" and @greyhawk and I enlarged the drawing or rather the paper itself.

You can see the open space in the center and the thin strip at the very bottom:

Last week I drew in the blank areas and reworked the drawing here and there to make it cohesive. I filled in foliage and plants as needed in the foreground as well as ocean, sky and a few mountains.

And as per the client and her designer’s request, I’ve added tons more shells, crabs, a whale, some Hmu Hmu fish, and enlarged the sea turtles.

It’s interesting because at every step they kept saying “more” and “bigger” objects like crabs, shells, and can't I make the fish bigger and what about adding one more and what about the shells, how about making them bigger? And with each question my heart would sink a little more, how could I integrate the requests but still make a piece that I feel good about?

This is one of those times that I begin to wonder whether I'm the right artist for the job. Doubt drains the joy right out of the work and I feel more and more dread. I wonder if someone else could make these additions the client and designer are asking for and it not look ridiculous, because I certainly couldn't and all I could see is how this piece would be a disaster! But this is exactly when I need to gather my confidence and speak up for my own vision instead of sinking.

This time that's exactly what I did. I found a diplomatic way to explain how I'd experimented quite a bit with scale as I was trying to accommodate their requests and had found what worked and what didn't. The thing is, even though we’d thrown realistic perspective and proportion out the window with this piece, somehow the spacial composition still has to make sense. Things still have to relate to each other to some degree and draw the eye around the shapes and colors to good effect. I also reminded them of the original vision and that we all had wanted a timeless quality to the aesthetic of the mosaic and how I was working to create this. For example, they had wanted a whale tail sticking up out of the water and my solution was to create a leaping whale to prevent this piece from becoming cliche or a caricature.

I'm not sure they "saw" what I was saying, but they believed me and gave me the go ahead without further adjustments which was a relief.

So on Monday I rolled some slabs of wet clay - I'm using white earthenware for this project- let them sit overnight to stiffen, and then yesterday I used the slabs to start cutting the mosaic!

I drew a section of the mosaic on to the clay and using a scalpel, I cut out the shapes of the tiles, in this case, foliage from the lower left hand corner of the drawing.

This is one of my favorite parts of the process and I had a mini celebration while I cut the first few sections.

Much more about the project will be shown in coming posts. This project is a giant undertaking so you'll see plenty of each stage along the way. Thank you for your interest in my work and for supporting my blog, it makes all the difference!