Blog – Page 21 – Summerhouse Art

#4 in the Pique Assiette Mosaic Inspiration Series – Intuitive Composition

Posted on June 25, 2009June 5, 2020 by Helen

Making a Pique Assiette mosaic can actually be a meditative pursuit. Pique Assiette Mosaics are a type of mosaic made with dishes and found objects. Part of the fun with this is wandering through my huge collection of dishes to find pattern and colors that work together. The time spent cutting pieces of dishes or tiles, the slow work in arrangement of those pieces is a quiet and focused time.

Past inspiration entries have been about an idea that started a piece, as in the Hawaii shrine or a certain dish that inspired a shrine as in the Geisha Ladies Japanese Shrine. The composition was planned, the drawing made, the goal in mind, more or less. Now I’d like to show a much more abstract way of approaching mosaic. Strangely enough it is the easiest to do, the hardest thing to explain and also the hardest to teach. A photo or two might explain it better.

All artwork has a composition. Good composition has a balance to it. Not that everything should be symmetrical, but that colors and pattern are visually weighted to make the piece have balance, as in not top-heavy, or with too much happening on one side, without the balance of a larger area opposite to give an equal weight. I think it’s something we all do intuitively.

Sometimes I just want to create a surface, a surface that has no real narrative to it, in that the surface is not a picture of anything. It doesn’t tell a story, the pieces don’t make up a recognizable object like a bird or tree. It’s just a surface. I like to think of it as abstract.

Sometimes I feel like doing a nice relaxing mosaic. I just want to play with color, texture and pattern and let the mosaic happen.
The two mirror frames I’m showing today were done just for the fun of creating an abstract surface.

To start I choose the basic shape. These were square, because I just happen to like the square format. The mirror is set just a little deeper at the bottom, to give a visual lift to it. But I have sometimes thought it would be interesting to have each side equal because then there would be no up or down designated and the mirror could be turned to enjoy a new view of the design.

Next, I chose the colors and other elements. Maybe I’ll have only one plate with a pattern on it that I love. So I choose that and then choose other colors and textures to compliment it or set it off, riffling through my collection of dishes for just the right ones. The first mirror frame above, has a plate from the 50’s on it, a delicate turquoise and black pattern of leaves and lines shown in the photo above. I only had one of these plates so could only use it sparingly. The broken pieces of that one plate are placed throughout the design, a little bit here and there, spread out over the surface.

And all the other space? Well, that’s were intuitive composition comes in. That’s where letting the mosaic flow on it’s own comes in. I just start. Putting down a piece in the corner, whatever fits, and keep going from there. If a piece fits naturally next to that, in another color, it goes next to it. The curves above give a sense of movement.

It’s like fitting a puzzle together. Your eye scans the broken pieces for fit, for a color, a texture and if it fits, in it goes, glued down and on to the next one. You step back now and then and sense, rather than see the balance in the composition. You know intuitively that you need a bolder color over in this area to balance the pattern across from it. It’s hard to explain, but much easier to do if you let your instinctive color response go to work.

And yes there are a few “rules” to make the composition more interesting for the “eye”, such as varying the size of the pieces, as in the close up shown above.

The mosaic, with the help of my mediative, intuitive senses and vision, just creates itself. And at the end, what do I have? If I trust myself, and let things happen, very often a piece with movement, that encourages my eyes to roam the surface directed by a curve of color which leads it to another color or texture that leads it to another area and somehow you end up with a surface that your eye loves to skate over,over and over. Eye-candy I like to call it.

Why is it so hard to teach? Most people are not used to just letting go and allowing intuition to take over. That’s the crux of it I think. But once you do and let it happen the focus on arranging and searching for the next piece is meditative and quite relaxing. And once you’ve done it once, maybe just a little bit addictive.

The Accidental Poppy Garden

Posted on June 21, 2009June 21, 2009 by Helen

Sometimes, when we design a new garden we may have a very loose idea of where we’re going and try to create that. In the case of the front garden it was to make a garden that could stand up to the dryness in summer and still survive the wet Victoria winter and solve the dead grass problem. This is a story not just about creating the garden but the something unexpected that happened, another serendipitous garden event.

The old front garden was a short length of flower bed, a tangle of day lilies on one side and lavender on the other, and not much else, that stopped abruptly as it reached the part of the yard that is supposedly owned by the municipality. That area was always a problem. It was hard hard dirt with miserable grass on it mixed with weeds that we poured water on every summer. It looked awful, dried out and ugly, the water couldn’t really sink in and the grass didn’t benefit from all this expensive water. So last fall or maybe it was late summer, Eric and Bill dug up huge portions of it so that we could make a xeriscape garden. They almost broke shovels doing it, the dirt was so hard. There was not an earthworm to be found, finding it impossible to get through this cement-like soil.

We had been saving and finding plants to put into this garden, things that were supposed to do well in a xeriscape or low watering garden. Things like day lilies, yucca, grasses, red hot poker, irises, and crocosmia.

When it was all dug up and ready to plant, Hart, our good friend who has a knack with gardening and arranging plants, was called in to supervise. We like to call him the “Lone Arranger”.

Each plant was put in it’s own hole that was first filled with our own compost. We didn’t have enough compost to do up the whole area so we cheated a bit and just put it in where the plants were going.

So it was all done, everything planted. We only had to eventually move some yuccas that had been planted around the pampas grass and were now hidden by it. We sat back, exhausted and enjoyed our handiwork.

Sometime in November or December, Bill went out and sprinkled poppy seeds around the whole area. The seeds were all mixed up, saved from poppies that had grown in the back garden.

This spring not much showed of these, until about the last month or two. Then we saw all sorts of poppy plants coming up. And being haphazard and ok, maybe a bit time-crunched too, the sprouts of these luckily missed being weeded out.

Imagine our surprise and delight this month, when, in this awful clay dirt we had huge poppies of all sorts. They came up in lipstick colors of red, mauve and fuchsia.

Double and single flowers popped up (they are poppies after all) amongst all the planned xeriscape we’d worked so hard to create. It was a gorgeous sight! We had expected a few poppies, but nothing like the amount we got. We’d accidentally created a poppy garden.

Poppies are a short lived phenomenon. They come up, their gracefully drooping flower pods lift up and burst into bloom, petals like silky tissue paper. And too shortly thereafter, it seems, they are done blooming and set themselves to seed in gorgeous seed pods.

I swear they are the only flower that looks beautiful in every stage. But you’ve got to be quick and get out there and enjoy enjoy.

Serendipitous Gardening or How We Came to Accept a Wild Gardening Style

Posted on June 20, 2009January 16, 2015 by Helen

I devour garden books. I read them voraciously to learn how to plan a garden, what to plant where, how to design the space, all of that. I admire the well ordered designs, the borders made up of drifts of flowers that I see in those books. But somehow none of this takes.

The foxglove self seeded and the Humming birds love it.

Our garden always ends up being a sort of a wild tumultuous space. I used to apologize my way around the garden when company came over, for it’s messiness, it’s over-grown-ness, it’s haphazardness. Part of me wanted something much neater and organized, like those pretty gardens in the books.

But then, I don’t know when exactly, I started to appreciate the way plants just pop up where ever and to enjoy the delightful surprises. And most of all I came to accept our way of gardening. I’ve decided to call it Serendipitous Gardening.

Why is our garden as it is? I suppose it’s because we hate to pull anything out. If it looks ok, we leave it. And I can’t throw anything out either so if I have to divide plants I’ll just pop them in another spot or we’ll create a new bed to house them. Or it could be because the compost with the seeds of spent flowers gets spread all around in the spring and those seeds just get a chance to grow and have a change of view? Or is it because I can’t say no to some plant or other that I don’t need or even have room for that I find at a garage sale? When I get home the poor thing gets bunged into any available space just before it expires in the pot. Who knows? A bit of all of it I suppose.

The flox among the iris — The phlox among the iris

Sometimes being sort of laissez-faire about it all has it’s rewards. Plants that were seeded somewhere else re-seed themselves in unexpected places. Like the phlox that grew up in and around the iris bed. How did they know they would set off the irises so well?

Or the bluebells and rose campion that pop up around the orange day lilies creating just the right mix of complementary color.

Or the mallow that I left in with the squash plants just to give the veggie garden a bit of color. As artists, I suppose, we have come to appreciate and delight in the serendipitous results.

#3 In the Pique Assiette Mosaic Inspiration Series – Meditation, the Bowl and the Buddha

Posted on June 19, 2009June 14, 2015 by Helen

Meditation was something that I always wanted to do but never thought I could. I’d read about it and researched it a bit and decided it was not for me. Me, empty my mind? Don’t think so. Find 30 minutes to meditate more than once a day? Uh uh. So I gave up on it. But one day at the library I found a book written as though just for me, “Miss Instant Gratification”. It was called “Meditation Made Easy” by Lorin Roche.

Well, I snapped it up and you know, it was wonderful. The book made it all easy. You don’t have to empty your mind, just return your focus to your breathing, after allowing thoughts to “float through”. Ok I could do that. And you can do it in 5 minutes! Or even less once you get the knack of it.

He encourages you to develop your own way of meditating that fits your life. Since then, I’ve been recommending his book and been busy teaching my version of it to everyone I think needs it . And that, just recently, included my #1 son Paul (we have three sons and he was our first) and his wife, Olya, who are just a bit frazzled with a quite wonderful, adorable, beautiful and totally lovable (grandma speaking here) two-week old son.

Which brings me to my next Pique Assiette Mosaic inspiration and how it came to be. Bet you wondered where this was leading, didn’t you?

Again, the piece started with a piece of crockery but this time it was already broken. Using crockery, dishes and ornaments puts this mosaic into the Pique Assiette category, which roughly translated means “stolen dishes”.

Hart, our fellow artist and great friend, had a client who had this lovely Japanese bowl, actually an antique, maybe valuable, now not fixable and she gave it to him to do his creative magic with. And he gave it to me.

Somehow the colors in the intricate pattern which are an almost burnt orange color and a deep blue seemed to be a perfect backdrop for one of my most meditative buddha ornaments from the Japanese restaurant collection. And with the thought that a circular shape would be most restful, the design inspiration was almost complete. Another blue plate, with an edge of concentric raised lines, was broken to create a feeling of rippled water in front of the meditating figure which became the finishing touch.

So there were all the elements of design inspiration: Meditation, Japan, blue rippled water, circular shapes being restful, the beautiful pattern of the Japanese bowl in burnt orange and blue, and the white buddha all coming together.

Today this mosaic has it’s honoured spot in the corner of the greenhouse, in amongst the plants and next to a wicker birdcage. It draws my eye and just it’s peaceful look gives me a meditative moment. And according to “Meditation Made Easy”, sometimes a moment is all you need.

#2 In the Pique Assiette Mosaic Inspiration Series – The Japanese Plate

Posted on June 11, 2009June 14, 2015 by Helen

I didn’t have an idea for this piece to start with. I wasn’t thinking about Japan at all. Until I found this beautiful plate at a garage sale. It was an authentic gorgeous plate Hand Made in Japan, printed on the back and had a little chip in the border. The reason it had been sacrificed to the sale table I suppose. The pattern was of chrysanthemums or carnations, I’ve never been sure. But I think that the former is more of a Japanese favourite. It was a large plate, about 12 inches across. I saw it as a background for something. And I knew it would look really good broken and reassembled in a mosaic.

Geisha Mosaic, Helen Bushell, summerhouseart.com

So the plate was the start or maybe it was the finish. Because suddenly I had a use for a few things that I’d collected in my studio and it all came together. The Geishas are actually drink glasses from a Japanese restaurant.

The backs of them are open and there is a little hole in the front of each one to put a straw in so you can sip your drink. These drink glasses come in all types of figures from geishas to samurai warriors to Buddhas, lots of Buddhas. You find them everywhere at garage sales and thrift shops. And I have a collection of them. Ok I have lots of collections but more about that on another blog. So now I had the geishas in front of the plate, on a shelf and I needed something else. The quiet little birds had been gathering dust for ages and their color caught my eye as being perfect with the colors of the plate. And they gave this sort of lyrical touch to the ladies.

What else? A bowl. A Japanese bowl to float a flower in for my little Japanese shrine.

Geisha Mosaic Detail, by Helen Bushell, summerhouseart.com

Then there was shape of the background to deal with, and in keeping with the theme, I drew out a pagoda shape for the top of the shrine. Now I only had to come up with something for under the shelf. I also collect those little porcelain floral bouquets. No, not to display, but to take apart very carefully with plyers or a hammer and chisel, and use the flowers on mosaics. They’re good even if a bit chipped because you can hide the missing petals in an arrangement easily. So under the shelf there is an arrangement of flowers. They don’t necessarily match the plate but who wants to be too matchy-matchy? And the little lid from a broken pot, turned upside down? Well, that became the finishing touch.

I suppose this was a case of inspiration backwards. The plate started the idea and the Japanese shrine came later. The Hawaii shrine started with an idea and the pieces came later. Backwards, forwards. Inspiration works either way if you let it.

Quote for today. Apropos, I think, for today’s blog

Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.
– Thomas Dewar

#1 in the Pique Assiette Mosaic Inspiration Series – Hawaii

Posted on June 10, 2009June 5, 2020 by Helen

Next week I’ll be starting mosaic classes for a few new students and I know that one of the questions everyone usually has is how to come up with an idea for a piece. So I’ve decided to do a series of blogs on inspiration.

Well, getting inspiration is really not all that hard. Sometimes you just let it all happen. Often, my problem isn’t getting an idea but choosing which idea to work on. I usually have too many ideas. I’m a Pisces and apparently making decisions is tough for those of us in this area of the horoscope. Or, as Jimmy Buffet says ” Indecision may or may not be my problem”.

It may be easier to show how inspiration works than explain it. So, as I said in the beginning of this blog, I intend to do a series and will show a few of our mosaic pieces and how they came to be. And hopefully that will say a bit about inspiration.

#1 in the series is my favourite mosaic,” Aloha”, one of the first mirrored and shelved mosaics I did. What was the inspiration? Well, obviously, Hawaii. We had enjoyed every moment of a vacation in Hawaii. We’d immersed ourselves in every touristy thing and soaked it up. We wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts and carried our camera around our necks.

Will and Helen in Hawaii, summerhouseart.com

I fell in love with the Hula dance and the music and Will and I both fell in love with Hawaiian shirts. And then of course there were the palm trees and all the tropical flowers, like orchids. Well, nirvana. And did I mention that the first morning on Oahu we went, wait for it…yup, garage sailing. And some of the pieces that went into this pique assiette mosaic came from those Hawaiian garage sales. Pique Assiette, by the way refers to a type of mosaic done with broken dishes and found objects, which is right up my alley.

Once we got home, I had the idea to make a piece to commemorate our trip, and things just started to happen. Things for the mosaic started to appear on trips to thrift shops.

saltpepperwm

The dishes with the palm trees and parrots, the Hawaiian dashboard dancer ( I LOVE kitsch) , the bananas and the plates and salt and pepper shakers. All of them just appeared in my site lines as if by magic.

Aloha Shrine by Helen Bushell, summerhouseart.com

At some point I got the idea to have a shelf to hold all of the Hawaiian goodies. And then I had to create something to put under the shelf. This gave the extra benefit, we realized later, that when you were sitting down you had a whole other dimension to enjoy in the mosaic.

detail, Aloha Shrine by Helen Bushell, summerhouseart.com

So that’s how inspiration works. Get an idea, a germ of an idea and somehow what you need for it will make itself available. And all of those things will, if you let them, arrange themselves until they feel just right to you and viola! There you are with a mosaic project to do.

And another thing, don’t let the reality get in the way of artistic inspiration. Ok, I know that bananas don’t grow that way on banana trees and that there aren’t really any parrots in Hawaii, why I don’t know. And that bird that’s sitting on the pineapple on the top, well, that just happened and looked good. So go with the flow, relax and let inspiration take it’s course.

Finding the Wonderful, Whimsical, Just Silly and Fun

Posted on June 5, 2009January 16, 2015 by Helen

Sometimes I think that garage sailing is the most fun when you find the unexpected, whimsical, odd or wonderful. As in odd juxtapositions of the beautiful and spiritual with the junk. For instance, we were out looking for good stuff and wandered into a flea market given by the Tai Chi society here in Victoria. And there, amongst all the dribs and drabs of goodies was this wonderful shrine.

It was beautiful, replete with offerings of fruit carefully piled up in bowls.

Another day, over in the Vic West area of Victoria, we found this rather whimsical and thought provoking and well, just silly front yard sculpture. A bike supposedly growing out of the rock? Or had it dissolved into the rock? Who knows but obviously someone was having some fun and having a creative moment.

A bike "set in stone". — A bike “set in stone”.

And I have to admit I rather liked this sign. I sometimes feel like my garden is an Experimental Dandelion Farm too. Too bad the sign wasn’t part of the garage sale offerings or I would have snapped it up.

As for fun, we always find that we just can’t ever pass up an opportunity to pet a dog. And this one has the facial expression down to an art.

Who can resist those ” pet me, pet me” eyes. Not us.

Burning Daylight

Posted on May 24, 2009January 16, 2015 by Helen

Now having said this I have to admit that we’re not like some of those people that are derisively called “early birds” that a lot of ads warn against. No, we’re not that intense. We know that garage sailing is like fishing, sometimes you catch something, sometimes you’ve just had a nice outing. In fact, we find that there seems to be an odd way that one week you’ll finds lots of good stuff and the next, just a few little things. That was yesterday. Just a few little things, a nice thermometer for the greenhouse for 25 cents. An amber glass globe that I’m hoping to use in the garden somehow as some part of a sculpture.

But we did all right on the plants. This sale is never really advertised and but somehow we manage to find it every year. There’s always a good selection of plants to choose from.

We had a few misses. Things that we liked but were not in the budget. Like these clothing forms that Will had such great plans for. We never expected that they were such distinguished ones, from the 40’s, the seller said, and worth $35 and $45. They were almost going to become garden sculptures with very unique heads created for them. Ah well.

Then there was the little lamp base that had such a wonderful expression that I had to take a photo, but didn’t really want to own. The photo would suffice.

We always try to work in a park, an ocean fix or garden either for our coffee break or at the end of the morning. Today it was Finnerty Gardens at UVic. This garden is known for it’s collection of Rhododendrons, all apparently started from seed. This is Rhodo time and we almost missed it. Luckily there were still quite a few in all their glory.

bamboo2 — Yes, the bamboo really is this tall.

The garden has the most wonderful stand of bamboo. It’s huge, tall, and just gorgeous. I wish we could fit it in our garden.

All in all, the gardens were a lovely and serene wrap-up to our to our busy morning of garage sailing.

Will next weekend be the alternate weekend, the weekend when we find lots of good stuff? Who knows?

Making Time

Posted on May 19, 2009January 16, 2015 by Helen

Our fridge is home to many artsy handmade collage magnets and also to many quotes that I’ve found assuring, inspiring or thought provoking. I found a rather thought provoking one about time the other day and slapped it up there.

You will never find time for anything. If you want the time you must make it. – Charles Buxton.

Well Charles sounds rather like an overbearing patriarch but I must admit he has a point. Finding Time seems a bit like wishing for it and Making Time seems so much more solid, like a commitment.

This last long weekend Will and I spent a lot of time in the garden. We had designated this weekend for gardening time for probably the last few weeks. Other weekends had been too busy with the craft show or other considerations. And of course there had been other weekends where time just seemed to slip by as we shopped for groceries or other items on our lists. I suppose you could say we made time for the garden this weekend.

Rock Rose and Fried Egg plants in the front garden

We knew that we needed to spend some solid time in the garden. And this weekend we did manage quite a lot. The shade garden got weeded. The compost was assessed and deemed pretty good, not quite to the “black gold” stage but close enough to give some “fiber” to the soil. We readied part of the garden for squash plants and were planning to finish that up the next day. Then yesterday dawned grey and cool so we took advantage and weeded the front garden. Usually we only work in the front garden in the evening when it’s shaded. But a cool cloudy day had to be taken advantage of. At the end of each of our gardening days we weren’t good for much more than supper on the couch in front of a good movie. In fact, we were actually surprised that we could even move the next day! But we did, ok a little slowly at first, but pretty soon back to normal.

We found a couple of gifts planted by the birds in our garden. These varigated thistles are growing in the front garden, very antisocial with their pricking leaves but oh so unusual and beautiful. We decided to let them grow, weeds or not.

Scotland's national flower — Scotland’s national flower

On the other side of the driveway I’m also letting another big thistle keep it’s spot. Ok I know it’s a thistle but it gets some really wonderful flowers on it at the end of the summer when it’s reached gargantuan dimensions. Hey the Scots are keen on them, isn’t it their national flower? And as a weed we already know it’s tough so will fit in well with the xeriscape theme.

On a previous post I mentioned my intention to have fun everyday. And I realized yesterday as I was breaking up the soil and carefully extracting the weeds and their roots from the dirt and gleefully throwing them into my little green and yellow weed wagon, that I was actually having fun. Seeing the garden all tidied up and weed-free was pretty darn nice too. So in a way I suppose we made time for the garden and for fun at the same time.

Happy tulips in the freshly weeded garden

Which brings me back to Charles Buxton of the Make Time philosophy. I am going to try to consciously think of things that are fun everyday as I get up and make time for them. Today, I’ll have a choice, either plant up the pots of flowers I’ve got waiting on the back deck or work on finishing my sculpture at last while listening to some good music. Which will I do, I wonder? Anyway, you have to admit it’s nice to have a choice.

Bird Playgrounds

Posted on May 14, 2009January 16, 2015 by Helen

The lilac is in bloom in all its glory. The breezes carry the perfume and you have these little moments of pure joy as you lift up your face to catch that wonderful scent.

I just had to take a photo of one of Will’s found art sculptures with a background of lilac blooms to set it off.

We have a couple of arbours in our garden. One is to hold the clematis and the other in the far corner of the garden carries the grape vines. Each one of these was made with all found materials. As a finishing touch Will and I went beach combing, not exactly a hardship for us, to find the embellishments. These arbours are projects that never really finish. Will works on them as he finds time and inspiration. We have stacks of beautiful driftwood piled up ready at hand for him to create with.

I personally love the spirals he’s created with recycled,rusted barrel hoops. The one on the grape arbour has as it’s crowning glory an old glass doorknob. There is really something magical that happens when the sun hits that doorknob just right and it glows and sparks as the sunlight streams through.

We like to joke that these sculptures serve a much more distinctive and important purpose. They are not just art, or as I like to think of them, three dimensional drawings of curves and lines. No, these are bird playgrounds. Little sparrows and wrens love to play on them, ducking up and under and chasing each other and happily chirping. It’s a sight to see.

And I love to tell Will that he has real purpose as an artist, not just to create lovely bits of sculpture, but more importantly he has a definite role as a bird playground creator. What more could he want?