About Linda
I’ve always been a maker.
I am a mosaic artist who has been making a wide variety of mosaics since 2010. I have been much more prolific since 2015 when I retired from my 38-year career in hospital community health services. I then started working part-time as the COO at a small non-profit providing wrap-around health care services to homeless women. By the fall of 2020 I fully retired (while isolating in the middle of the Covid pandemic), and have been mosaicing intensely since then.
I had been a “maker” all my life, learn to sew as a young child and by high school was making a lot of my own clothes. I bought my first (ancient) sewing machine when I got my first nursing job in 1970. Continued to sew for my family and the house through the 1980s, but less often as clothes were cheaper and I discovered I didn’t have the focus and precise measuring skills that quilt making required. I enjoyed embroidery but lost interest in that too. I had been exposed to weaving by a women who had a handloom, no harnesses, and wove the vegetation she found around her Martha Vineyard home and I was enthralled. I bought a floor loom in 1977, and kept trying to create unique and 3D, but the precise mathematical skills needed for complex weaving did not interest me though I collected a ton of yarn!
I was first magnetically and irresistibly attracted to mosaics when I saw my friend Betsy Rodman nipping little pieces of shiny glass at music festivals we both attended around 2008. She had talked about her work, but once I saw it, I had to have more and more! Betsy and Suzanne Owayda opened Mosaic Oasis, a mosaic studio and supply shop in my town. I took my first class there in 2010 and I was hooked.
My first piece was a sphere with glass, and I’ve continued to do a lot of 3D forms. I have played with and experimented with many materials such as hand cut stone, shells and fresh water pearls, slag and cullet glass, porcelain, ceramics, and of course stained glass and smalti. I like to feel a personal connection to each piece, or have it tell a story. I would like to try some pieces reflecting my passion for social justice but not a “knock them over the head” with the message- but haven’t yet figured out how to create through subtlety a powerful emotional response.
I have exhibited at several New England Mosaic Society shows at the Schwamb Mill, Somerville Museum, Post Road Art Center in Marlboro, at Lasell College and at the sculpture installation at Art in the Orchard in Easthampton. I also had two pieces in “Please Touch the Art” exhibit at the Mosesian Center for the arts June-September of 2019. My mosaiced chair won prizes at “Chairful Where You Sit” in June 2019. I had a small piece exhibited in the “100 Mosiac Moments” for the Society of American Mosaic Artists which was held on-line in 2020.
I work out of my home in Arlington, MA. I first worked in a section of my office/guest room, expanded to my partner George’s house on the cape. I was planning to make a new shed in my yard into a studio, but just in time my son moved out from my basement and I now have the entire basement for my studio. I do have a station in the shed for making malmischiato with a blow torch. And I still make most of my projects portable so I can bring them (actually so George can schlepp them!) to the cape where the light is wonderful.
Thank you for stopping by my website to see my work. Happy mosaicing!