Well, the Spring session of classes begin today at Lillstreet Art Center. Always fun to start a new session full of new ideas, new demos & so many possibilities. Tonight I’ll meet my Intermediate Wheel students… to find out how I can challenge them & how they will challenge me! And as they come to class tonight, they’ll also pass this wonderful “mandala” installation on the exterior of Lillstreet. Look closely… a little flashback… and you might just find one of my pieces immortalized in the bricolage mandala!

With a little extra time last night, we got to see the beautiful “Four Seasons” mosaic by Marc Chagall down in the Chase Tower Plaza in Chicago. Beautiful mosaic murals portraying life in Chicago through thousands of little tiles.

According to the Chicago Cultural Affairs website… “Composed of thousands of inlaid chips in over 250 colors, Marc Chagall’s mosaic artwork The Four Seasons portrays six scenes of Chicago. It features a vocabulary of images informed by the artist’s Russian-Jewish heritage and found in his Surrealist paintings such as birds, fish, flowers, suns and pairs of lovers. Chagall maintained, “the seasons represent human life, both physical and spiritual, at its different ages.” The design for this mosaic was created in Chagall’s studio in France, transferred onto full-scale panels and installed in Chicago with the help of a skilled mosaicist.

Chagall continued to modify his design after its arrival in Chicago, bringing up-to-date the areas containing the city’s skyline (last seen by the artist 30 years before installation) and adding pieces of native Chicago brick.”

Enjoying a little TEXTURE TUESDAY today with this beautiful & fiery glass mosaic!

My studio neighbor Karen Patinkin has been working on cleaning up her studio lately, and has gathered this wonderful collection of test tiles. I’m loving all of her slip trailings & glaze combinations on these porcelain shards… and I’m sensing perhaps a really cool mosaic piece in the making?!

Looks like mosaic artist Kristin Conneely is getting ready to bring some peace, love & happiness to ART IN THE GARDEN next weekend!!! Something we ALL need more of these days!

For more information… www.grassrootsartfair.com

When they installed a new mosaic wall behind the sinks in the new Wheelthrowing classroom at Lillstreet… my first thought was “Who’s going to clean the splattered clay off of that?”

Well, today I found out… MY SUMMER CAMPERS… that’s who!!!
Today they asked what else they could do while we were cleaning up… so I told them… and they were more than happy to oblige!

Looks like Kristin Conneely has been working her “mosaic magic” getting for this weekend’s ART IN THE GARDEN in Glenview. We’ll be gathering at a new location just down the street from last year for this wonderful grassroots art fair! Not only will Kristin’s mosaics be there… but I also know that we’re doing a couple collaboration pieces just for this art fair!!!

Check it out at www.grassrootsartfair.com

Looks like our mosaic artist is up to something cool. I sent Kristin Conneely a bunch of my soda-fired beads to play with… and she is!!! I can’t wait to see what kind of final collaboration pieces she comes up with for ART IN THE GARDEN! These collaborations are one of the things that makes ART IN THE GARDEN so much fun… and there are several different ones in the works! Can’t wait to see them all in person the last weekend of August in Glenview!

Please disregard the missing word on Kristin’s post…
too many beads, not enough words… HA!!!!

Looks like my mosaic friend Kristin Conneely is playing around with some of my soda-fired beads… working towards some new collaboration pieces for ART IN THE GARDEN!!! I can’t wait to see what she finally comes up with when we have the “Big Reveal” at the art fair on the last week of August in Glenview.

Looks like I’m not the only one working on some collaboration projects for ART IN THE GARDEN!!! I see that mosaic artist Kristin Conneely is making a sweet little piece with some textured pottery pieces from my friend Cory McCrory! These collaborations are so much for for all of us… getting to play with each other to make cool things we don’t usually get to make… as “normal” art fairs kinda frown upon this kind of collaboration!!!