Mosaics

Thinking organically when creating art is hard for me. I’m an analyst. I take my hammer (or my head), smash it into a problem to bash it down to its tiniest parts and then fit the pieces together in dozens of different ways until I solve it. Hard to smash a piece of paper with your head until the Mona Lisa pops out.

I watch my friend’s daughter sit down for five minutes with a pencil and paper and turn out a beautifully realistic drawing of a person that captures light and shadow and emotion. Fourteen-year-old me would have cried in frustration that my work looked like a plate of sick while hers should be in a gallery. Me now knows it’s just not my skill set.

My Postcard idea for Port Liberty grew on me. I really wanted to draw them myself. And I tried. And they were atrocious. I had just about given up the idea until I was surfing the net and found a channel showing scenes of the original Nintendo 8-bit games. Eureka! Epiphany!

I loved those old games. And they were drawings. Drawings made up of teeny tiny pixels. Just like mosaics create pictures with bits and bobs of broken glass or pottery. My analyst brain could see how the little squares fit together to create pictures. Mosaics could be my bridge to art. Postcards, a visitor’s guide to Port Liberty, maybe even a children’s book. The sky’s the limit.

What did I learn from all this? There’s always a bridge from A to B. Even it’s not the path that everybody else might take. And mosaics make really cool art.