Pupils unveil mosaics

By Charley Morgan

CHILDREN at The Mead Primary School near Trowbridge have made two large mosaics with an Australian theme. The Year 1 pupils had an arts week at the beginning of term which included a visit from artist Anita Andrews. They learnt how to make mosaics and decided to create two words from the school’s vision statement ‘safety’ and ‘happiness’. One picture shows a koala bear climbing up a tree away from an animal below and the other shows birds and butterflies flying around. The mosaics are made on a wood base from broken up pieces of tile which were glued and then grouted in place.
Art coordinator Leanne Jones said: “The children loved it, they enjoyed learning something new.” The arts week was paid for partly through West Wiltshire District Council’s Participatory Arts Workshop Scheme

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Mosaic art brings focus on to healthy living (UK)

More than 200 people from the area ranging from 18 months old to those in their 60s contributed to the brightly-coloured design at the centre in Allaway Avenue, Paulsgrove.

The project was organised by Dot to Dot, an arts organisation based at the Healthy Living Centre, which has been running community arts projects for 21 years.

The design took about two months to complete and features aspects of healthy living, including fruit and vegetables and a range of everyday activities.

Ms McCarthy-Fry said: ‘The mosaic is fantastic. The great thing about it is that it really made the children who took part think about what healthy living and the centre are all about. They have thought carefully about it and it’s a great welcome for people visiting the centre. They should be very proud.’

The unveiling was followed by the switching on of the Christmas tree lights, organised by Paulsgrove and Wymering Carnival Committee.

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‘Tribute’ building honors Heller and Thiebaud

By Bob Shallit

The midtown building will feature a Wayne Thiebaud mosaic.

It’s a tribute unlike any other in greater Sacramento.

In an architectural homage to their fathers, two Sacramento development partners are moving ahead on an innovative building at 20th Street and Capitol Avenue.

Michael Heller, the ambitious midtown developer, intends the four-story “Tribute” building to honor his late father, Michael Heller Sr., who died last year, and to enable his project partner, art dealer Paul Thiebaud, to recognize his father, acclaimed artist Wayne Thiebaud.

The office-and-retail project’s most striking feature is a 50-foot-high, three-sided mosaic-tile art piece being designed by the elder Thiebaud.

The mosaic’s imagery will be the Sacramento River Delta, similar to many of Thiebaud’s famous paintings, Heller says.

The rest of the building will be a Rubik’s Cube-like collection of glass panels in four shades – clear, white, light blue and dark blue – selected from Thiebaud’s palette.

The building’s inspiration, Heller says, is the Sacramento Municipal Utility District headquarters that his father helped build in the 1950s and where the senior Thiebaud contributed a mosaic tile wall that’s still visible from Highway 50.

“That’s one of the great pieces of architecture in town,” Heller says of the SMUD complex at 6201 S St.

The new project, which recently received approvals from the city’s design and planning commission, could start construction next year and be completed in 2010, Heller says.

The building’s architecture is deceptively simple but extraordinarily detailed, says designer Brian Crilly of Lionakis, the Tribute building’s architecture firm.

Throw in the Thiebaud art, and it becomes “the kind of (project) that’s supposed to happen in Chicago, not Sacramento,” Crilly says.

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Bridge mosaic begins to shape up

By PAM FIRMIN

SUN HERALD – A new mural by Elizabeth Veglia has been completed at the foot of the Biloxi Bay Bridge in Ocean Springs. The mural depicts beach scenes from Ocean Springs.

Like Santa Claus, mosaic artist Elizabeth Veglia is trying to finish her work before Christmas, but unlike the jolly ol’ elf at the North Pole, Veglia is hindered by cold weather.

While his deadline is set in stone, hers is a work in progress, dependent largely on a minimum 50-degree temperature for the mortar that binds her 550 square feet of mosaic mural at the Ocean Springs end of the Biloxi Bay Bridge.

Veglia’s composite of coastal art and artists is half complete. It’s a blend of four separate artworks by Susie Ranager, Patt Odom, Chris Stebly and Ching Walters into one continuous scene that incorporates water and adds a tree line.

The largest and the smallest of its four panels on cement board are already up, and she is working at her studio in the Kiln on the middle two.

“I need several days of warm weather to get (a panel) up,” she said. “It’s in parts and pieces; the seams are open. As I work on them, they are in pieces. I put seed pieces in at the bridge to cover the seams to create a continuous seam and cover the bolt holes.”

The mosaic mural stretches about 110 feet, telescoping from a height of 8 feet to a foot-and-a-half while matching the arc of the bridge as it descends to ground level in Ocean Springs.

In sunlight, the tiny tiles already up glitter on their convex and concave walls and form water and waves that seem to flow, sailboats and fish, a sunrise, the far Biloxi casino horizon, even an image of the new bridge, itself.

At night, they’re illuminated by powerful lights provided by Mississippi Department of Transportation, which financed the massive art project that also serves to hide the behemothic pillars underneath the bridge. Surrounded by a wide walkway, the art is visible only from the beach road and area south of the bridge, including the new yacht club that, in Veglia’s words, “has a bird’s eye view of it.”

This is Veglia’s largest mosaic, with second place to her first such work, the 400 square-foot community mosaic she did in 1983 at Harbor Square Park next to Hancock Bank in downtown Gulfport.

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Mosaic Classes to start at Lorton Arts Center January 2009

The new catalogs should be in the mail shortly. Registration is now open via phone, mail and fax and will be available online Dec 8th.

Introduction to Contemporary Mosaics
Learn the basics of creating glass mosaics for interior use. Learn methods of mosaic application, tools, cutting techniques, grout, adhesives and subtrates. This class will provide the students with the fundamentals tools and techniques needed to create their own fine art mosaic piece.

Beginners (ages 16 and up)
Section A
Meets Wed (7pm -9:30 pm)
First Class Jan 14 (9 weeks)
Code: GLA124W09A (W-7)

Section B
Meets Sat (4pm -6:30pm)
First Class Jan 17 (9 weeks)
Code: GLA124W09B (W-7)

Tuition $195
Supplies estimated materials fee $40.
Supply list mailed upon registration

Intermediate Contemporary Mosaics
This CLass is an open workshop/studio environment and students should arrive with a project or an idea on the first night. Class will include digital slides and lectures on examples of contemporary mosaics.

Meets Thur (7 pm to 9:30 pm)
First Class Jan 15 (9 weeks)
Code: GLA224W09 (W-7)

Tuition $195
Supplies estimated materials fee $40.
Supply list mailed upon registration

At the Glass Building – Building 7
http://www.workhousearts.org/

Lisa Osgood-Dano

Stolen mosaic recovered in N. Philly

By DAVID GAMBACORTA

Paul Pickel’s prayers have been answered. Well, sort of.

It was exactly a month ago today that Pickel, owner of a Vero Beach, Fla., stained-glass studio, learned that $100,000 of his artwork had been stolen in Philadelphia.

An 8-by-12-foot mosaic of Italian saint Padre Pio and two stained-glass windows depicting the Ascension of Christ were stored in a van that was stolen from a motel parking lot near Philadelphia International Airport.

Pickel, 65, feared that his meticulous work would have been for nothing and that his works would be lost or destroyed, possibly putting his studio in jeopardy.

But Pickel’s tale of woe took, ahem, a miraculous turn on Wednesday, when police found the stolen van at 6th Street and Nedro Avenue in Olney. The Padre Pio mosaic was inside, apparently unharmed, but the stained-glass windows were gone.

Still, Pickel is counting his blessings.

“My dad is actually going to fly up to Philadelphia on Monday to see the mosaic,” said his daughter, Lisa Pickel. “He’s thrilled.”

Lisa Pickel said it took her father’s artists almost a year to complete the mosaic and stained-glass windows, parts of which were made in Italy.

His employees had stopped at the motel, on Tinicum Boulevard near 88th Street, last month on their way to the Bronx, where they were due to deliver the artwork to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

When the pieces were stolen, Pickel’s spirits were crushed.

“He was jubilant over how the artwork came out,” Lisa Pickel said. “He only does a few projects of this magnitude each year, so he was a little worried it would have hurt his company.”

No arrests have been made in the case. *

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Jesse Durko’s mosaics make a piece-ful spot

By Charlyne Varkonyi Schaub

It’s obvious Judy and Marty Bloomfield live for their art.

Their 3,248-square-foot house in Boca West looks like a gallery of contemporary art — filled with bowls, sculptures and art furniture.

Even the gardens were created to feature their art.

It’s no surprise that Judy was miserable when she looked out her back window at a plain, unattractive stucco wall. What it needed, she decided, was a mosaic to reflect the beauty of their garden.

“Who can we get to do the mosaic?” she asked Jesse Durko, the owner of Jesse Durko Nursery in Davie and designer of the garden.

He didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll do it,” he said, which surprised the Bloomfields. Durko, an oil painter who had a one-man show in Fort Lauderdale two years ago, never expressed any interest in mosaics.

Durko decided to create a mosaic reflecting the plants in the garden and started collecting ceramic tiles. But when Judy saw the tiles, she wasn’t happy with three shades of green that were available.

Her somewhat unorthodox solution was to go to HomeGoods and buy plant-colored green plates — whole and broken.

“I went to every HomeGoods in Palm Beach County and bought bags and bags of them,” she said. “The people in the stores thought I was nuts.”

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Was the Aksa Mosque built over the remains of a Byzantine church?

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

Excavations under the Aksa Mosque in the 1930s, photographs of which were recently uncovered, revealed a Byzantine mosaic floor.

The photo archives of a British archeologist who carried out the only archeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount’s Aksa Mosque show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the remains of a church or a monastery, an Israeli archeologist said on Sunday.

The excavation was carried out in the 1930s by R.W. Hamilton, director of the British Mandate Antiquities Department, in coordination with the Wakf Islamic Trust that administers the compound, following earthquakes that badly damaged the mosque in 1927 and 1937.

In conjunction with the Wakf’s construction and repair work carried out between 1938 and 1942, Hamilton excavated under the mosque’s piers, and documented all his work related to the mosque in The Structural History of the Aqsa Mosque.

Hamilton also uncovered the Byzantine mosaic floor and beneath it a mikva (ritual bath) from the Second Temple period, which he pointedly did not include in the publication about the mosque, but instead photographed and labeled in a file about the mosque, archeologist Zachi Zweig said on Sunday.

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Glass gets artist all fired up

By Bobbi Seidel

A glass-on-wood mosaic of an egret by Tim Dorland (below, in his studio) of Freehold. Photos by KEITH J. WOODS/Staff photographer

A graceful egret wades in flowing water that mixes turquoise with shades of light blue in a rectangular wallpiece. Dark palm trees wave over a sea of orange and silver on a 15-inch-round platter; iridescent undertones shimmer.

The detailed feathers, the curve of the neck of the bird, the sway of the tree, the shading of colors . . . a fine artist’s eye and hand are at work here.

Yet the wallpiece is not a painting or mixed-media piece. The platter is not ceramics.

These are glass art, the egret a mosaic of various-shaped pieces of glass on wood. The platter is fused glass — glass that is fired, painted, fired again.

For Tim Dorland, such artwork is both creative expression and full-time job.

His one-of-a-kind mosaic, stained glass and fused glass art and jewelry are found at Folio Art Glass in Colts Neck, a shop owned by his wife, Kim Folio-Dorland, and her parents, Ray and Barbara Folio.

Behind the shop, two small rooms hold giant kilns, and a workroom is where Kim and her parents create functional glasswork such as dinnerware, using stencils, powdered paints and enamels.

Above the shop, the Dorlands’ cat Frankie guards Dorland’s studio, where pieces of colored glass lie about like so many colored jewels waiting to be chosen.

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Mosaic, stained glass pieces created in Vero Beach stolen in ‘major hit’

By Lamaur Stanci

Staff from Pickel Studio in Indian River County look over a mosaic of Padre Pio prior to a trip to deliver it to a cemetery in the Bronx. Instead, a car burglar in Philadelphia swiped the mosaic and the truck it was being delivered in.

A longtime mosaic and stained glass artist could be going back to a pricey drawing board.

Last month, burglars in Philadelphia stole a van holding a mosaic and two stained-glass pieces valued at more than $100,000 en route from a Vero Beach stained glass studio to a cemetery in the Bronx. The 8-foot by 12-foot mosaic featured the Italian saint Padre Pio and was designed by Conrad Pickel Studio in Indian River County.

Owner Paul Pickel said the cemetery commissioned his studio for the work about a year ago. The mosaic would have been placed in a community mausoleum at the cemetery, he said.

Two employees were delivering the mosaic, as well as the two stained-glass pieces, in a truck when they stopped at a hotel in Philadelphia, Pickel said. The next day, they found the truck had been stolen, he said. Pickel said if he doesn’t hear from Philadelphia police soon about locating the artwork, his studio will rebuild it from scratch.

“It’s a major hit,” said Paul Pickel, 65. “I’m more concerned about the mosaic than I am the truck. We only do about five or six projects of this magnitude each year.”

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