Marsh

I just completed only my second mosaic art piece of this year. Entitled Marsh, it was a difficult piece to create.  I enjoy creating abstract pieces with no true subject matter. One reason is that I‘m not all that confident in my ability to create realism, which makes it even more tedious than other mosaic subject matter. 
My inspiration came from the many photos I have taken over the years, and from studying the colors and forms in marshes as I drove by them.

With these images compiled in my brain, I then literally drew out a rough sketch on my phone using my finger. My intention was to create an abstract of a marsh, but as I continued to work on the mosaic, it “devolved” into more intricacies than I had planned.

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Initially, I gathered an array of yummy materials and textures, but then decided that the piece would be made mostly with hand cut stained glass. Thus, another veer from my original plan.
I started with the water and cut the glass into a shape with some curvature that suggests a bit of movement.

When I started on the marsh grasses, I decided to cut each blade of grass. Ugh. What was I thinking?  I do like the layered look in the foreground of the piece, but as I progressed back from that, those little blades of sawgrass became smaller and smaller. I chose to use a medium olive green to grout all grass whether the blades were green or wheat in color and am happy with that decision.

I opted for swaths of varying glasses to complete the landscape portion, choosing a darker green for clumps of trees in the horizon. I also added the smallest tesserae I’ve ever used in a fine art piece, with tiny pieces of slate mimicking the skeletons of dead trees in the background.

​The sky was a little less tedious opting for larger cuts with various light blues and light greys. I used a pale blue grout for the sky.  Though finished, and even with the dimension of the grass overlay, I felt the piece still read as flat and lacked the oomph I hoped it would have.

I then remembered that I had some tempered glass. I've used thinner tempered glass in other work to represent clouds, but the only intact pieces I had available were quite chunky.  I painted the packs white with a dash of grey, then adhered it to the sky.  That element finally completed the piece and added quite a bit of depth.

www.instagram.com/ree/C8mwBMsOpFp/?igsh=MXZyODVzZW5uN2VKAll and all, I am happy with the piece, but maybe not giddy.  There are a few things I would do differently. Not worth changing, but will bug me, nonetheless. Below is a quick video of how the piece evolved. Sorry for the roundabout way of accessing the video. Could not get it to upload in the normal way. https://instagram.com/reel/C8mwBMsOpFp/?igsh=MXZyODVzZW5uN2VK

​Thanks for stopping by,