The Long Walk to the Ball Park
Picking up where I left off before my two-week gig as a resident artist at McDaniel College, I introduce the second of my mosaic seminar demonstration pieces. I call it “The Long Walk to the Ball Park,” because it reminds me of summers in the New Jersey of my youth. The road to the local ball park back in rural New Jersey in the 1960's was a dusty dirt road where wild blackberries grew alongside fields of queen anne’s lace. The ball park was an adventure whether it was baseball season or not. A vacant ball park was the setting for childhood war games - the dugouts serving as bunkers, the stands city walls to be scaled. And the concession stand had a flat roof suitable for furtive scurrying. This last mosaic reminds me of the overlay of natural and man-made textures on the dirt road to the ball park - or perhaps I just think of these things again because of the summer heat.
The glass in the mosaic are drops from a stained glass window project which required very thick block glass. The blocks had to be faceted by hand chipping out pieces with a hammer and anvil. The multi-colored glass drops fit well onto a flat surface because they have at least one flat edge. Turning the mosaic on its side reveals more keenly the effect of the overlapping wedges of glass. Many of my recent mosaics have this kind of high relief which can almost be read like a diorama. I may even consider displaying them at some point to be viewed from above.
Picking up where I left off before my two-week gig as a resident artist at McDaniel College, I introduce the second of my mosaic seminar demonstration pieces. I call it “The Long Walk to the Ball Park,” because it reminds me of summers in the New Jersey of my youth. The road to the local ball park back in rural New Jersey in the 1960's was a dusty dirt road where wild blackberries grew alongside fields of queen anne’s lace. The ball park was an adventure whether it was baseball season or not. A vacant ball park was the setting for childhood war games - the dugouts serving as bunkers, the stands city walls to be scaled. And the concession stand had a flat roof suitable for furtive scurrying. This last mosaic reminds me of the overlay of natural and man-made textures on the dirt road to the ball park - or perhaps I just think of these things again because of the summer heat.
The glass in the mosaic are drops from a stained glass window project which required very thick block glass. The blocks had to be faceted by hand chipping out pieces with a hammer and anvil. The multi-colored glass drops fit well onto a flat surface because they have at least one flat edge. Turning the mosaic on its side reveals more keenly the effect of the overlapping wedges of glass. Many of my recent mosaics have this kind of high relief which can almost be read like a diorama. I may even consider displaying them at some point to be viewed from above.
No comments:
Post a Comment