A Little Bit of Female Goddess Power

It has been more than a few days since my last post but fortunately that does not mean I haven’t been artistically productive. My art has just shifted temporarily away from drawing and towards making several small mosaics. Since I’m working on ten of these simultaneously it will probably be another few days to a week before they are finished.


The motivation for this shift was one of expediency. The recent deluge has flooded my basement studio. Fortunately I had picked up a bit before the rainy onslaught and managed to thereby save an even worse clean up. During my picking up I came across a few narrow strips of cement boards left over from teaching or the scrap from some project. The strips were just wide enough to lob off into eight five by seven inch rectangles to fit a box of frames I had on hand of the same dimension. There were two odd size six by five inch pieces that I opted to decorate anyway and spring for some extra molding to frame those as well.

I spread these pieces out, rummaged through my collection of manufactured tiles and found objects to come up with ten interesting compositions. I then wired these - horizontally or vertically depending on the composition - and cemented down the main elements of each along with a border design.

Then the deluge hit and my basement became a pond instead of a working studio. I brought the mosaics upstairs and have been working on them since in my higher and drier corner of my living room. Now that one by one, they are coming to completion I can record their visages as well as my thoughts on each.

The first finished piece I’ve posted above. I had happened to find five similarly glazed ceramic pieces that I had made years ago that were based on German jewelry designs from the middle ages. Also with a similar glaze was a small female figure based upon neolithic stone goddess figures like the famous Venus of Willendorf. I gave the female goddess a central place in the composition and surrounded the whole with undulating strata of stained glass baked with silver leaf separated from white vitreous glass by a strand of metallic beads.

The other day I mentioned this mosaic to my doctor, who felt that there just weren’t enough positive and powerful images of women in art. So here she is - a little bit of female power in a modest small mosaic.