What are mosaics?
Part one of a three part blog on the place of mosaics in contemporary art.

PART ONE: WHAT ARE MOSAICS? FIVE THINGS THAT THEY ARE NOT
Joan Eardley‘s paintings are urgent; running-to-catch-the-last-bus kind of urgent. They are full of rushed energy, of stops and darts, turns and returns. They grapple and wrestle and finally heave the beast to the ground. There is no diffidence in them. There are scribbles and swirls and drips and blotches and slap-it-down-on-the-table flashes of pure, gorgeous, rich, deep (so deep you could sink) colour. You can see why she stuck to her two beloved places – the Scottish sea and the Glasgow city streets, why she didnt feel any need to tramp around looking for new subjects to paint. ‘It seems silly to shift about,’ she wrote and so, standing still, she found everything she needed right where she was.

If their urgency means they are unruly and dishevelled, that only makes them more compelling. They are piled and layered and flung. I wandered around the current exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art recently with two reluctant teenage boys. ‘How can you keep looking?’ one asked petulantly. The other had already disappeared. ‘What are you looking at, what do you see?’

I couldn’t answer so I went back without the boys and then I realised that what I saw is what mosaics are. Or rather what they are not. They are not these paintings. If our minds are like those banks of monitoring screens you see behind the scenes in security firms, then at least one of my screens is more or less continuously playing a mosaic theme. The theme of the moment is the place of mosaics in contemporary art. I came up with a theory about why pre-Byzantine mosaics don’t appear in art history books, so now I am thinking about mosaics in art galleries: I want to know where mosaics are, what they are called and what they are doing.

To do this it helps to step away from mosaics and to look at other mediums, to look at Eardley’s brush strokes for example, and then to think about them in relation to mosaics. As it happens the exhibiton was as much about Eardley’s sketching and working practices as it was about her paintings which is helpful. It allows us to use her work to delve into the nature of mosaics and to show, by contrast with Eardley’s pieces (although the points would apply equally to other visual arts), what mosaics are by listing what they are not:

FIVE THINGS THAT MOSAICS ARE NOT
- Alterable. Eardley drew and redrew, composed and shifted her compositions, worked and re-worked the canvases before finally completing her paintings. Looking at her scribbles and smudges brought it starkly home to me that the one sure thing mosaics are not is alterable.Yes, you can dig out a bit of thinset, un-glue a wrongly placed tesserae or even a whole section if you are using the reverse paper method but by and large once you’ve laid a piece, you’ve laid it. The scribbling and smudging stage goes into the designing process but once you’ve commited to the design, that’s it.
Tightly spaced detail. Photo and mosaic: @Helen Miles Mosaics - Spontaneous. This is a sub-point of the one above. Eardley’s works are brimming with spontaneity. The medium of mosaic holds and restrains. However much you can do with mosaic, they is still a lot that can’t be done. Mosaics can’t spit and scream and pogo. I would hazard a guess that mosaic artists like Rachel Sager or Cleo Mussi are fairly spontaneous as they work – allowing the moment and the mood to dictate the laying of the tesserae. But only up to a point. You can choose a particular piece as you work which will be influenced by the pieces around it and your feeling about that piece but once you’ve placed it, that’s it. (see above)
Mosaic artist Rachel Sager at work. Photo: @Mosaic Art Retreats. - Layered. When you look at the surface of an Eardley painting you can see how the layers of paint have been applied and scratched away. Sometimes she dabbed thick Van Gogh-like globs of paint onto the canvas or stuck down blades of grass or sweet wrappers and painted over them. The works are two dimensional with a three dimensional impact. Mosaics are full of texture and can of course be three dimensional but the materials in mosaics, the individual tesserae themselves, each have their one and indivisible surface quality. That quality can be intense and the juxtaposition of different qualities within one piece can be highly effective but you cannot look through a tessera as you can look through Eardley’s painted surfaces.
- Contextual.The rooms containing Eardley’s paintings in the exhibition also include glass cases displaying among other things, her letters, newspaper clippings and photographs. Eardley writes of Gauguin, Picasso and Jackson Pollock and there are also references to Pop Art in her work. But even without these clear pointers, it is obvious that Eardley saw and admired other painters and there are shadows and reflections in her paintings which refer back to previous and contemporary artists.
On the Way of Walking by Toyoharu Kii. Photo: @Mosaic Art Now. Such is often the way with artists, but not so with mosaics. The more I think about it, the more I can convinced that this plays a major role in why mosaics are comparatively marginalised in contemporary art. You can experiment as much as you like with mosaics, push boundaries, break traditions and be one hundred per cent artistically original, but nonetheless almost the first thing an observor will think of, or compare your work to, is the mosaics of the ancient world. Mosaics are shackled by their ancientness. Never mind what artistic influences might have been swirling through your veins including (but not limited to) Diego Rivera and the other great muralists, Marc Chagall, Picasso, or Fernand Leger ( who all experimented with mosaics) or even Gabriele Munter, Pontillism, Piet Mondrian or Bridget Riley who either use blocks or dots of colour to build an image or pattern the way mosaics do. Forget it, the Roman tradition is so deeply embedded into mosaics’ identity that they struggle to be understood on their own terms.
- Ambiguous/fluid. Although this is not fully true of Eardley’s paintings, there are some where it is almost true – you can look at them and interpret them however you please. Patches of paint run and merge and fade into other patches. Mosaic compositions can also be ambiguous, playing with the surface and texture and colour rather than sticking to a clear design, but the individual tesserae or the lines which make up the overall composition will always be clear: whatever you do, mosaics are pixallated.
So where does that get us? Well, it answers my son’s question about what I was looking at and I think it helps to see how the mosaic medium differs from other artistic media in order to understand where mosaics are placed in the world of contemporary art and why they are perceived in a certain way. Now sit tight and get ready for Part II of this three-part series on what mosaics are.
I love this topic and will ponder it longer. One of my favorite mosaic quotes is:
“… the medium of mosaic is not painting with stone and not sculpture, but an art the essential quality of which is luminosity.”
Jeanne Reynal (1903 – 1983)
I don’t know if you are familiar with it but it pretty much sums up my feelings.
Thanks so much Valerie – I hadn’t heard the quote which is a very good one although I would assume Reynal was talking about Byzantine mosaics and so I wonder where that leaves us workers in stone?!
Thanks, Helen. Very thought-provoking.
I have been pondering the concept of fluidity in mosaics a lot these last six months as I prepare for my current exhibition. The idea that I work in a medium that is solid and immutable and bone-bruising hard, yet that breaks so easily under my hammer, and that I then concentrate so intently on coercing into a mosaic that flows and ebbs and weaves as smoothly as liquid (I hope).
I find it interesting.
Yes, Heather, I quite agree that all good mosaics should and do flow but that’s not quite the same as being fluid! Good luck with the exhibition. Helen.
A very interesting read Helen, thanks for sharing. I do hope, however, that with the recent evolution of mosaics in its contemporary form, we begin to see more mosaic art amongst the world of art today. Not only is it barely seen in contemporary art museums around the world, it’s also not included amongst the curriculum of art mediums to be taught.
You are quite right, Amal – mosaics in contemporary galleries are what I will be writing about in my next post and I do believe there are signs that this art form is beginning (slowly) to receive the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, your point is quite valid about it not being taught although it’s interesting to note how many of today’s commercially successful mosaicists came from an art school trained background, found mosaics for themselves and decided to focus on the medium as their means of expression.
Helen, as a viual artist with 50 years practice, and have devormted my practive entirely to mosaic at present.
I am building our first home, I am 70, wife 64. The lives of artists are not always financially rewarding.
What is immeasurable is the wealth we receive as creative people.
I constantly ask mosaicers why the want their work to be considered “ART”?
Surely, the intent we put into our work can make it “ART, as any other media, and as you pointed out in your painting assessments, paintings usually follows certain formal rules, which we cannot ignore. We bend those rules and break them in our quest to “perfection – the pentimento demonstrates this.
However you can also look at ‘paintings’ by Ad Reinhard and Kurt Schwitters where the qualities you mention in the paintings, aren’t apparent and not employed.
I am a proud mosaic maker, as are I am sure there are proud potters, photographers, and etc., happy to do the work and leave the “ART” thing to itself.
My personal mantra is to try and make better and new things eveyday.
Look forward to your continued blogs.
Geoffrey
Many thanks for this, Geoffrey. In general I agree with you but I think the reason why it matters is that mosaics are commonly disregarded which is frustrating given that they are very fascinating, complex, beautiful and artistic (or not). I just want people to notice them! Long may you continue with the mosaics and good luck with the house building.
Love your conceptual exploration on the topic of “What is” and starting from the “What is not” to get there. A few of the teachers, of traditional mosaics, I have studied and spoken with over the years have talked with me about the same topic. As you have referenced, I have seen that the anchor of the Roman and Byzantine styles have been hard for traditionally trained mosaic artists to shake; both styles often reflected in their works. (That is not to say that it should not.) As we unravel these restrictions, the freedom of lines, materials, substrates, and binders have exploded into a new phase of mosaic expression in the contemporary world of art. I look forward to reading Part II 🙂
Thanks, Wasentha. Yes, a huge amount is happening in the world of mosaics and I feel that it is breaking free from the old restrictions and that new exciting creative possibilities stretch ahead. That’s why we’re in this game! I hope you’re thriving, Helen.