The making of “Flagstaff to Sedona”; my blog of a mosaic long slog
The two photos mashed together. The left taken November 2018 the right taken February 2019 or 2020.
The final mosaic. Read about the journey, it was a slog.
I made a large vertical 14”x24” wedi board substrate in 2016. It was going to be a desert, an abstract showing the problem and the infrastructure issues of the desert water issue. I made a sand colored thinset and covered it with sheets of transparent thin mica as a base. I messed around with that for a while and never found a workable design concept.
So I put it aside.
I took a photo of the landscape on the road between Flagstaff and Sedona in Arizona on the way to my daughter’s house in Phoenix in November 2018. In March 2020 her husband Shawn posted on Facebook a photo taken on that same road.
His photo was more dramatic that mine, and together they looked great so I mashed them up together and designed a horizontal work based on it. I took that old substrate and added another hanger so it could hang horizontally.
In the meantime, I was learning and developing my own style, integrating what I learned from many teachers. I had taken two workshops with Laura Rendlen (https://www.facebook.com/laura.rendlen) a renowned mosaic artist who creates mosaics in an impressionistic painterly style, using color and texture. I decided to use her style of portraying trees and foliage using bits of smalti. In 2018 I went to my first SAMA (Society of American Mosaic Artists) conference in Boston. I became enamored of mosaic andamento and wanted to build that into the red hills of Sedona.
Ready to go, right?
The Sky
The first thing I tackled was the right glass for the sky. I tried to match the deep, cloudless blue of the photos. In 2020 I bought a ton of blue smalti in various sizes until I realized the sky should not be made of small tesserae but one solid sheet of glass. I bought several sheets of large blue stained glass on-line. I painted the back of one to make it lighter but I cut it and cemented it to the substrate. It was way too dark.
This substrate got put aside again.
In 2021 I went to the Youghiogheny Glass Factory in Pennsylvania while on a road trip to the Ruins Project and found a better piece of blue glass. I cut it three times to cover the old dark glass and kept getting it reversed. I finally made it work, but I broke it, creating an obvious crack. I painted the dark blue glass white and I glued the cracked new piece on top of it anyway.
I put it aside again.
The Trees
I really didn’t want to make the trees out of pieced together smalti or stained glass. In 2020, I went to a stained-glass studio near our cape house and asked Rhonda for ideas, and she taught me how to make fused glass trees. These turned out great. I would have to change how they were supposed to be positioned so one branch would cover the glass crack. I was hesitant to glue them on.
I put it aside again.
The Rocky Hills
My idea was to collect actual red rock to use for the hills when I was next in Arizona in 2022. I kept yelling at George to stop the car when I saw a pile of rusty looking stone next to the road. The problem was we were hundreds of miles from Sedona in the western mountains and the stone was a grayish sandstone with a dark rusty coating that would not work for the hills of Sedona. When I got home, I pulled out the stone we had foraged at the Ruins project in 2021. It is red dog, a byproduct of coal extraction. The coal had to be separated form the shale it was usually co-located with, and the shale became a by-product that was discarded into piles all over coal country. These piles caught on fire and turned the shale various shades of red. I was hesitant to use an inauthentic material, but having no other choice at the time I used it. With encouragement from fellow mosaic artist Laurie Frazer I did three quarters of the red hills, got discouraged again, but after a break I planned to move on, thinking I might like it better once the trees had foliage.
The Evergreen and Deciduous Trees and Shrubs
I had bought a lot of green and yellow Mexican smalti in many shades, and had cut them into small bits sorted by color in many containers. This took a long time in 2022. I put foliage around the tall trees first, and realized the pieces were too big. I made another evergreen tree to the right in a darker color and smaller pieces, but it didn’t look like a tree.
So, I put it aside again. And actually hid it out of sight.
In August, 2024, I had just finished two complicated projects and wanted to move on to something fun and creative. I decided to act with discipline and first finish slogging through the Arizona piece, which I was sure I wouldn’t like in the end. So, I pulled it out and just started working on it section by section. I finished the red rocks, and added trees along the top of the rocks and heading down the valley. I took small vertical pieces of smalti to better shape that evergreen tree in the center. It was so improved I became motivated/obsessed to keep going.
I cut the rest of the green and yellow smalti into much smaller pieces, less than 1/16th inch. The smaller pieces made the foliage and the flowering shrub look so much better. I was beginning to like the piece (only seven years later!). On one October weekend I worked constantly to finish it, despite an aching back, butt and hips. Not to mention insomnia because of the intense and obsessive focus on finishing.
Congratulations for slogging through this blog about a piece I struggled with. I am so glad it is no longer taking up a lot of space as a big project box, but is now compactly hanging on the wall. And I hope the good ending will encourage me and you to keep slogging.
Much gratitude goes to Shawn Potter for the photo that started this process. I think I finally pulled off a pretty good mosaic. Maybe he will want to give it a permanent home in Arizona!