I had dedicated the summer to finishing my Liberty Snake project. In so doing, I have also been jotting down some thoughts and observations as to why this took me four years to complete. Like most projects that require time, multiple steps, and a lot of space, there is much that tends to get in the way of that and thwart the best of intentions to finish. During the course of completing this art project one thing that needed to be attended to was the repair work on my mosaics. These took up space on my work tables for quite some time - space that was needed for rolling out those twelve foot long snakes. I had delayed repairing these mosaics because of the tedium involved, I suppose, as well as not being able to find the right glaze for the missing or damaged parts of the ceramic pieces on the mosaics.
Once I had resolved to finish my mosaic repairs, however, progress was steady. The first step was to clean the broken surfaces. The old cement and ceramic shards had to be carefully scraped off of the substrate.
After cleaning, the holes in the mosaic surface were not difficult to fill in. It was just a matter of finding the right smalti and ceramic colors and cutting the pieces to refit. The worst repair problems were the ceramic bullnoses that finished the edges of the mosaic. These had to be made anew from raw clay, trimmed, then glazed and fired. The newly made bullnose tiles fit fairly well on the mosaic with monkeys.
For the second, larger mosaic, I needed black glazed ceramic bullnose tiles. Not being able to find my black glaze, I opted for something different. I painted skulls, bones, and teeth onto the red earthenware with black and white underglaze, carved outlines in sgrafitto, then applied a clear gloss overglaze.
These then had to be attached with thin set mortar, allowed to set up overnight, then grouted the following morning.
The new mosaic tiles brought the old mosaics back to life, such as that is in the time of pandemic.
No comments:
Post a Comment