Broken Dish Mosaics – Page 2

#5 In the Pique Assiette Mosaic Inspiration Series – Feng Shui and the Foo Dog

Posted on June 26, 2009June 5, 2020 by Helen

I like to dabble in all sorts of things, like to shake up my thinking a bit. Feng Shui was one of those interests that I took up for a time and I even incorporated some of its ideas into my home here and there. For instance the far corner of the greenhouse, the “wealth corner”, is full of Jade plants, or money plants. There are other little touches throughout the house too. And I admit that keeping the Chi flowing is a good reason to tidy up. But for an old hippie like me, there are just too many rules to Feng Shui, so I just picked up a few that I liked.

When I found the Foo Dog or Lion at a flea market, I knew I just had to do another Oriental Shrine pique assiette mosaic and I wanted to incorporate a bit of Feng Shui too. I’d already done a small shrine incorporating a couple of Blue Willow porcelain saucers, some chopstick rests, a little Buddha and a stork figurine. Pique Assiette mosaics, by the way, are a type of mosaic quite different from the usual mosaic made with tesserae, because of the use of the dishes and ornaments.

I’d been trying to cut a round mirror when it just cracked on its own in this wonderful semi-moon shape. Well, something like that cannot be wasted! The shape of that mirror dictated the shape of the shrine and created the shoulders to put the little chopstick rests on. Everything just flowed together.

Where did I get almost all of these wonderful ingredients for the shrine? Well, here in Victoria, we have the most wonderful Chinatown ever. I love shopping in Chinatown, especially in a hidden little alley called Fan Tan Alley which is just too much fun to prowl.

Fan Tan Alley entrance from Pandora Street, Victoria BC, photo summerhouseart.com — The mystery entrance to Fan Tan Alley from Pandora Street

Fan Tan Alley, Victoria BC, photo summerhouseart.com — Character shops in the alley

Now, with the find of the Foo dog, again things that I needed just seemed to fall into my lap. The background was made from some really good, antique Blue Willow dishes, given to me by an antique dealer friend of Eric’s. They were chipped and perfect for breaking. And break they did, like butter! So easy to cut and shape.

More chopstick rests and another little Buddha were found on a trip to Chinatown. Any excuse to go there will do, after all. Other oriental saucers were found in Value Village and before I knew it, the piece was ready to start.

But this time I wanted to incorporate some Chi into the design. Chi is a flow of energy in Feng Shui . For that I wanted a water flow, so I created a little “golden river” for the fish to swim in, that led to the serene Buddha. The Foo Dog or Lion was at the gate to protect the Buddha and would keep the “Blue Willow garden” tranquil.

And so Feng Shui, with a nod to tranquility, Chi, and the garden became a design element in this little shrine.

#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.

#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.