Previous Feature Friday posts
Today’s feature is an oldie from 2000. This is one of my early works with smalti. The labyrinth is the 7-circuit Native American labyrinth, commonly called The Man in the Maze; it was originally seen with a stick-like figure of a person inside the labyrinth.
I was drawn to this labyrinth over the more commonly seen 11-circuit, such as the the one in Chartres Cathedral, because of its angular design within the outside circle.
I used the chakra colors to symbolize a journey from the physical world—the beginning of the labyrinth—to a spiritual center. I did my best to transition between colors, but the palette was limited, as was my skill. I used the orchid pink because I either did not like the purple available to me then or there just was not a purple available to me. Sven Warner of Mountaintop Mosaics was the only smalti supplier I knew of.
I grouted the entire piece because, at the time, I did not know a lot better. The colors are still quite vibrant, but nowadays I would not grout the smalti labyrinth.
The in situ image was created with the Artrooms app that I talked about last week. It is extremely easy but has few bells and whistles. Also, most of the rooms are of a particular style—contemporary and spacious—which will not fit everyone’s needs. The lack of small wall space or tabletop easel-type options is disappointing.
Another small issue is that you can’t exactly control the dimensions of your work once it is placed on a wall. The app does seem to use the dimensions that you enter when you upload the image, but it is not reliable. I often have to resize my work and rely on my ability to visually gauge the proportions. For my own purposes, I’m okay with this, but for someone who needs it to be exact—well, this isn’t.
If I wanted to place a work on a potential customer’s wall image, I would need to get exact information from the client on their wall dimensions and require that they pay close attention to the mosaic’s dimensions. My primary goal at this time is to show how my mosaics perform in situ and this app allows me to do that.
I’ve played around with an online program called ARTPLACER which is pretty good but much more expensive. It showed me the dimensions of the mosaic as I sized it, and it also adjusted the mosaic to show it from an angle, which was pretty slick. Still, it would not reflect the textural surface of the work from an angle, but it gave a good idea of the general impact to the mosaic from a distance.