Frida Retablo

Blue Floor

One of the benefits of my parents annual visit from Colorado is that Jan and I feel compelled to take time off to do a bit of spring cleaning. Compelled...no, in a panic, is more like it. Took us a week of full time work in order to pick up, dust off and get the place ready for mom's white glove inspection. The studio stays like this until my parents leave, and then immediately begins to fall back into comfortable creative chaos. Comfortable for me, Jan would like my parents to visit more often ;)

This year we needed to deal with a section of the studio that had been part of our last year's remodeling endeavor, and never quite finished. The rust colored cement floor in this area was in need of some serious sprucing up after being battered with drywall and plaster.

So....we took a little trip to Home Depot (that toy store for adults of "do it yourself" persuasion) and bought a gallon of cement paint which we had tinted blue to match the counter tile. A few hours lof elbow grease later and wa la! New floor!

Flower Pot for Andrea's Web Site Award

Flower pot made by glazing the rim of a Home Depot terracotta garden pot and then embellishing it with handmade ceramic tile flowers and bits and pieces. Pot is ungrouted in these photos. (Eventually grouted with light grey grout.) Made and donated to http://www.wethepaper/ as one of the artist to artist awards for this web site's January Greeting Card design contest.

Summer Sabbatical

August heat hit and along with the insufferable weather, a variety of life interruptions and responsibilities put our creative pursuits on hold. Jan and I haven't been seriously at work for a month and the place looks like an archeological site, all those bright beads buried under layers and layers of dust. A few small endeavors while on summer sabbatical. Finished the Mary Retablo with a background of black smalti.Took this little fellow out of the kiln.And a funny looking chili pepper...
Now in the process of being covered with beads and glass. Made a bit of progress on the outside atrium wall.And since I couldn't be in the studio while putting new hardwood floors in the house, I brought the studio with me. A new window box valance. Have shards will travel.

Ceramic Cuerda Seca Technique

The three butterfiles in this multimedia mosaic are actually three single butterfly shaped ceramic tiles. There are no tiny individual pieces, just the illusion. Lines have been channeled in the clay while it is leather hard. After bisque firing and glaze firing, these channels will trap grout when the entire piece is grouted, leaving the butterflies to appear as though they were mosaiced from tiny pieces instead of a single piece. This is a form of ceramic Cuerda Seca technique. If you look closely at the bottom butterfly, you will see that I forgot to channel the large portion of its left wing. Notice how it looks different than the right, as if it were one piece instead of two.

New Glazes

While Jan and I have been busy studying Sculpture at UC Berkeley Art Studio Wednesday nights, we've also been experimenting with some new glazes. Here are four of Jan's tiles, freshly painted on greenware using low fire translucent underglazes which have been packaged to look like watercolors, and be used in a similar fashion. Once painted on the leather-hard clay they are ready to be bisqued in the kiln at Cone 04. And my attempt, using Amaco Velvet underglazes combined with Jan's watercolor glazes in the yellow center and the leaves. After these are fired, they will require a clear glaze to be painted over the entire tile and then re- fired to Cone 05. We have no idea how they will really look until the moment we lift the lid. That's the exciting part of ceramics, opening the kiln and seeing what happened during the second firing!

A few 3-D hand sculpted tiles loaded in the kiln and ready for bisque 04 firing. The fish tile and the frog on the lily pad are made with slip glazes, which we've been exposed to for the first time in our sculpture class--something new for us, painting with colored clay. Lots of experimenting in progress. In order to appear shiny after bisque firing, these tiles will require a clear glaze and a second firing at Cone 05 or Cone 5, depending on the initial glaze used.

Playing With Smalti

What did we do for fun this past weekend? Drive to our favorite of all places, the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland, and take a class in Italian Smalti from director, Laurel True. Here she is instructing a student in the fine art of using a hammer and hardie to chip the tiny smalti glass pieces. Takes some getting used to. Laurel, as always, is a dynamite instructor (wonderful spirit and lots of laughs) and a fabulous artist. Just getting to see what she's up to is worth the trip alone!

Enjoyed getting to see the Pet Portraiture Exhibit, and the latest mural made by her Mural Making Intensive Class on the wall of Kefa Coffee, a local business just down the street. (See Kim Grant's detailed post about making this mural at : http://www.kimgrantmosaics.wordpress.com/

As far as Smalti goes, it's is a gorgeous medium. Jan and I might even finish the projects we started in class, next year sometime;) Do suspect that having a background in painting greatly adds to the end result. Check out these painter/smalti artists: Lynne Chinn http://lcmosaics.com/ and Lilian Broca http://lilianbroca.com/

Paths are Made by Dreaming

Master bedroom and bath freshly painted,

new linens on the bed,

Pique assiette headboard completed.

along with new TV chest.

The Fairy mirror up in bathroom.

Daughter happy!

Mother giving up the room makeover business

and any future projects with a week's deadline!!

Do You Believe in Fairies?

Goodness knows I do, and could use a bit of their magic to finish putting together the surprise makeover of my daughter's bedroom this weekend. (An early birthday present. She gets home from vacation on Monday.) Dusted off the fairy mirror I started for her birthday last year (and never finished to my satisfaction), and gave it a quick face lift by adding a ceramic bow, butterfly and a few other little pieces. Hurray, check that off the unfinished projects list. This year's birthday challenge makes the fairy mirror look like a piece of cake.Will this overly ambitious mosaicing mom be able to pull it off in time? Pressure's on!
Only a few things left to do in the next two days. Like paint her bedroom and bathroom a soft mint green--I do the trim work and edges, Ramon rolls the walls. Put the new ceramic handles on her chest of drawers that her father so kindly painted white for me last weekend. Finish mosacing the little panels on the chest her TV will sit on, and grout it. And last but not least, grout and give a final coat of paint to her new queen sized pique assiette headboard; iron the bed ruffle and linens and put it all together before she walks in the door. Whew! Where's the room makeover team from HGTV when you need them? Marisa will be thrilled to see that I snuck in her little white ceramic kitty. When it got broken, I promised her, not too worry, I'd recycle it for her one day. Voila!
Can you imagine how fun it will be to grout this? --Julie

Writing on the Walls

One of our many larger than life projects around the studio is the outside wall to our garden atruim. This is an area that generally gets worked on when one is tired of other projects and decides to go outside and throw a few tiles up, so progress is slow. What makes it an enjoyable enterprise however, is getting to mosaic in an "everything but the kitchen sink" fashion, with an eye towards predominately woodsy colors. Working on this wall can be happily attended to without too much forethought.

The wall which runs perpendicular to this one, (sneak peek above) is a formal mural of a tropical nature. Stay posted for updates on that endeavor...

There are days mosaicing takes a back seat to a "play in the clay day." This means putting on our aprons and kindergarten hats, rolling out a slab of clay, taking out the the rubber stamps and cookie cutters and just plain having fun making whatever strikes our fancy to be fired in the kiln and put in the wall. Occasionally, literary inspiration will strike.

Why not? Words and sayings add visual interest and inspiration, and are easy to create using the endless variety of alphabet stamps on the market. We have found the ones that work the best in clay are sold at Michaels and are marketed as stamps for concrete. They are made of hard blue plastic and can be pressed deep into the clay. Concrete alphabet stamps show up in ceramic tiles particularly well no matter what glaze you are using. Here are examples of the concrete alphabet stamps used in tiles which replicate the word groupings used in stepping stones originally created by Frank Lloyd Wright.Rubber stamps are also functional, but typically more successful in polymer clay. In ceramic clay, the text is not always readily apparent because the stamp is more superficial in nature. Examples of rubber alphabet stamps in clay can be seen below in this box of tiles. Tiles read: Dreamspace and A Work of Art.

Not wanting to give up on all our lovely rubber stamps, we discovered a way to deal with this problem by first rubbing black glaze into the bisqued tile words and then wiping off any of the excess glaze on the surface of the tile, and then coming back and glazing the whole tile with a solid color.
Here is an example of this technique using a small rubber stamp, where the text has been high-lighting with black glaze: the first stanza of the W. B. Yeats poem, Lake Isle of Innisfree. Much more readable.

A New Toy Arrives in the Mail

Look what the postman delivered. What a beauty. Just what every girl dreams of... a North Star slab roller! Throw away the giant rolling pin--though it was great upper body exercise making slabs the old fashioned way. We've gone high tech now with an early birthday present from Julie's parents. Thank you! Thank you! Just in time to roll out perfect slabs of clay for the sculpting class we will be taking over the next 6 weeks at UC Berkeley's Art Studio. ( Are we a little spoiled?)

Something is Never so Broken that it Can't Live Again

Happy Birthday Geri! We have a saying in our studio, "Something is never so broken that it can't live again." So, when you broke one of your beautiful hand-painted dishes from Taladura, Mexico, inspiration for your birthday gift this year was a piece of cake. Now you will be able to set your table with a matching centerpiece.
Finished pot made to complement Geri's blue and white mosaic garden table. --Jan

Pi Kappa Alpha Mother's Day Auction Item

Mosaic pot filled with Gerber daisies, and ivy, made for Mother's Day Dinner silent auction hosted by the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

...On the table, ready for silent auction...sold for $100! Yipee!! --Julie

Polymer Clay Mosaics

This past year we had the priviledge of taking a class at Institute of Mosaic Art with Laurie Mika. Fabulous teacher! Great fun! Delicious class, don't miss it! The insight you will gain from the variety of techniques she uses will be invaluable. We've pulled some of them into our ceramic tiles.

Jan and I have been admirers of Laurie's work for some time. When her book, Mixed-Media Mosaics: Techniques and Projects Using Polymer Clay Tiles, Beads & Other Embellishments was published, we purchased our copies hot of the press. Helpful hint: don't loan your book out! It's rated 5 stars on Amazon and full of wonderful secrets, not to mention the all the photos of her beautiful art work.

Neither one of us had any experience with polymer clay, but we've been impressed with the range of looks one can get in this medium. What fun to work with all those stamps (we knew we'd been collecting them over the years for a real purpose) and the lovely, shimmering Pearl-X powders, Rub'nBuff, and Staz on Ink.

Here are the pieces we began in her class, finished at home, and hang in the studio...

A close up of Jan's work.

Nothing like getting to grout with beads, beads and more beads!

Forget the traditional gooey stuff...

For the Love of Mary: Work completed, Work in progress.

A Virgin of Guadalupe tile purchased in Albuquerque is the centerpiece of this large mosaic retablo. Made in 2005 with a variety of handmade ceramic pieces, glass beads, broken china and talavera tile, it frames a window in the Nunez house.
Measuring 6'X2', it was constructed on hardwood, and hung flat by being directly attached to the wall with screws on either end. After hanging, the two tiny areas left open for screw placement were patched with a pre-planned mosaic piece and grouted. The round edges of the retablo were obtained by running flat glass marbles along the sides and building grout over them to form an arc. Grout color is crucial to any mosaic--something we've learned the hard way. This piece works successfully in the room, because it was grouted in the same color family as the walls, using a slightly lighter colored grout.

Both of us have always been attracted to images of the Virgin Mary.

Discussions about mosaicing our own "Mary Wall" have been in progress for a while...something gloriously beautiful and full of religious icons. We've made a few pilgrimages to the Catholic book store to build up our collection of Mary books, and prayer cards, lots of gorgeous images...but the idea remains in creative ether, and the proper location hasn't presented itself yet.

Meanwhile, there are two new Mary mosaics sitting on the production line:

Jan's shrine is still in the early design process, framed with gold iridescent glass tiles and beads. The marble tiles on which she has transferred images of Mary, have been made to appear aged. The under painting of the piece, including the metal frame (not it's original color) was done by a combination of techniques, including "Rub N Buff " and gold leaf. The wood cross will eventually contain text and another image of Mary. (Of course, all is subject to change as nothing is yet glued down.) The plan is to mosaic the piece together using the tempered glass mosaic technique. This piece hopes to find a home one day with Sister Pat, founder of the Learning and Loving Education Center, which is a non-profit educational project of the Sisters of the Presentation in Morgan Hill, CA. The work of the Learning and Loving Center is to provide educational opportunities and outreach to low income immigrant women and their children living in south Santa Clara county.

Julie's shrine has been around a while and has gone through a variety of transformations. It originally had an image of Mary decopauged in the center and was grouted in a light colored grout. This was a poor choice, compounded by a worse attempt to rescue it by painting the grout joints with gold metallic paint. Disaster. The hope is now--after having every bit of grout chisled out, the decopauge picture stripped away, the center painted black and a new tile found for it's center piece--that tempered glass over the black background and black grout will eventually unify the work.

Atrium Studio Garden Update

When last we looked out the sliding glass door of the studio at the end of winter, the view looked something like this...

Then the days began to warm, and the calla lilies opened one by one.

Plants with a tropical attitude began finding their way into the garden beds...

And before we knew it, Spring in all its northern California glory dropped in...

The wisteria burst into bloom.

A clematis spread over the white trellis.

And allergies descended. (Achoo!)

A neon azalea beckoned to be taken home from the local nursery and introduced to the Angels Trumpet which by then had doubled its size and was really tooting its horn.

And wouldn't you know it, tiles began appearing on the walls... with word groups inspired by stepping stones made long ago by Frank Lloyd Wright...

Then a smaller wall fountain appeared-- another mural in the making... and nasturtiums, looking a bit chlorotic, but a reasonable facsimile...
Stay tuned for further developments.

At the end of April, our atrium garden appears to be flourishing...

Ocean Mosaic Panel: Happy Birthday Julie's Dad!

Nothing like promising one's father a mosaic for his bathroom wall on one birthday and delivering it on the next. Sneaky way out of giving a gift. Actually, who knows if Dad would have ever gotten a birthday present in 2006, had he and Cassie not called to give their daughter ample warning they were planning on driving out from Colorado to pick up "said present" in their Yukon truck, and spare her from having to ship it via the U.S. mail.

Clearly, setting a date for receipt of goods was a smart idea on their part. This meant (yikes!!) Julie had to actually finish the darn thing which she had been pulling her hair out to complete for almost a year. Here is a portion of the work in progress and ungrouted.

The 14 X 30" panel was mosaiced on sealed birch and made entirely of handmade, low-fire ceramic pieces, stained glass, beads and dichroic glass.

Paul and Cassie refer to it as the most expensive work of art in their house, after word got back to them that an interior designer, who had been in their employment, had mentioned to one of her co-workers that the people she was working for had a mosaic worth at least $10,000 hanging in their bathroom!

All of us got a good laugh out of this, and figured it might not be too far off the value of the panel if one charged for the hours (and headaches) that went into creating the many intricate sculptured pieces and then assembling them together.

The idea of submitting this piece to the Society of Mosaic Artist's of America (SAMA) juried competition in 2007, got tossed around for a bit. But by the time it arrived safely in Colorado and was hung in it's final resting place without (miraculously) incurring any breaks or chips, sending the mosaic off on a potential second journey seemed like tempting fate. So on the wall it remains, in it's quaint little venue. Visitors to the Castleberry house frequently request to use Paul's bathroom, and is it any wonder? Who needs a newspaper or magazine for entertainment while stationed there.

Mosaic Table Centerpiece Creations for Valley Christian High School

In 2005 and 2006, we created center pieces for the annual VCHS Teacher Appreciation Dinners.

Jan, a member of the Valley Christian High School Board, was chairman of this big event--one of the many she headed up for our kid's high school.

Putting together a memorable sit down dinner for three hundred people, would be a daunting enough task for most human beings. Add to that the responsibility of collecting and artistically arranging the donated items for ninety-some teacher gift baskets, and the creation of fifteen table centerpieces to be raffled as gifts at the end of the evening, and you have a recipe for many months of hard work. This is where bringing your girlfriend along as assistant comes in handy.

In 2005, we chose a colorful theme and planted the centerpieces with Gerber daisies. Using Terra Cotta pots from Italy, we glazed the rims and fired the pots, three at a time, in the kiln. After cooling, the pots were then sealed and mosaiced with a corresponding palette of tesserae. Production in the studio looked something like this. Here's Jan hard at work...
A few of our final pieces photographed by Jan's husband, Brent in their lovely back yard.
Many of our first ceramic tiles --in the form of leaves and flowers--were included in these pots.

In 2006, the Teacher Appreciation Dinner was held at the Cinnabar Golf Club in the Almaden Valley. For this elegant setting, we chose the theme "Under the Sea," along with a softer palette of colors. Once again the pots were glazed, but this time completely covered with our own handmade tiles created from clay slip, in the form of sea shells, mermaids and sea creatures.
The life-like appearance of the shells was obtained, after some experimentation, by painting with ceramic underglazes. Production in the studio (prior to our recent remodel) looked like this... Pots lined up and ready for grouting...Centerpieces were planted with a variety of sedum that had been propagated in Julie's garden for use in this project. These drought tolerant plants look a great deal like coral and plants one would find at the ocean bottom.
Difficult to see in these photos, two tiny glass fish on wires were stuck in the planter-mix to appear swimming above the plants. The centerpieces were placed in the middle of the table and coarse sand sprinkled around their perimeter. Real sea shells and dried star fish, along with glass beads and candles were then arranged around the sand for a lovely effect.
As always, at the end of the evening, names were drawn and the pots given away to the lucky winners.

The Evolution of an Art Studio

As our creative endeavors in the studio became more and more a full time occupation, we began tossing around a few ideas for changes that would make it a better working space. Remove the carpet and pour a level concrete floor. Wouldn't a bathroom of our own be nice? And while we are drawing up a wish list, why not a kitchenette with a small refrigerator? A sink with a hot water dispenser for tea? A sliding glass door opening to a shady, moss covered brick patio with tropical plants. And as always, shelves, shelves, and more shelves. Dream big, don't be afraid to ask, that's our motto!

And one day, the DIY Fairy Godmother of remodeling stopped by to grant our wishes, and with one good sweep of the wand, KABOOM, made a real mess of things!

Sadly, no tiny, dancing mice with dust pans ever materialized to help us with the clean up effort, and thinking it unwise to complain too much to one's Fairy Godmother, we promptly pitched in with our own bit of magic -- hand-plastering the walls, painting, patching, mosaicing the backsplash-- and at long last. Voila! Our studio!

A colorful home for the imagination, with lots of storage space...

A kitchenette... Frida Kahlo on the valance...

George Eliot's words of wisdom on the backslash:

"It's never to late to be what you could have been."

Julie's ocean mosaic in progress, four years now and counting. Inquiring minds want to know, will it ever get done?

Work stations in the conservatory with lots of light and storage...

A place to put our toys: drill press, easy bake polymer clay oven, soldering iron, glass grinder...

To store ceramic glazes...

A level floor-- which we fauxed ourselves--only took six inches of cement to get it that way!
Our very own powder room with shelves down the side for beads and miliflori. More shelves for our growing library of art books.
And yipee, the beginnings of a brick covered, atrium patio garden, with outside walls covered in hardibacker--that wonderful canvas those of us who work in mosaics put our pictures on.

A Bit of History First

On any particular day, you can find Jan and I working away in the back of this little white house. For sixty some years, it has stood quietly in the shade of an ancient oak tree, overlooking the vineyards of the Guglielmo winery in the eastern foothills of Morgan Hill. "Little" is more of a term of endearment we use for the place, the white object in the photo below is actually its crazy roof line as viewed from up the hill.

In 2004, we (the Nunez family) purchased the property from our neighbors, more for the value of the acreage, than the house itself. Any sensible person, looking over that structure--tilting on its foundation, built of rotting scrap wood, electrically wired by a handyman with a death wish, and randomly added onto over the years, with as many quirky rooms and passages as the Winchester Mystery house--would have thought only one thing-- tear it down. That was the tentative plan. Then the older kids started coming home from college and one by one settled into the heated and air-conditioned portion of the house. Suddenly we were landlords with a list of repairs.

The house has it's good points. Our neighbors had remodeled the kitchen and bath, and added on the world's longest master bedroom closet. The living room has a fantastic view of El Toro mountain. There is a pool at the bottom of the terraced gardens, and the old red barn out back is now home to our small herd of Alpine milk goats.

The studio evolved over time, as a result of having to deal with the more run down rooms of the house.

An aging conservatory-like structure, surrounded with antique window panes, topped with a dirty fiberglass roof and laced with spider webs and all manner of junk. How it was ever a haven for plants, I can't imagine? That room all but cooks its six-legged and human occupants in the summer with a flood of marvelous light.

Adjoining the greenhouse, was a mudroom room (for lack of better description), covered in dark paneling, deteriorating carpet and decorated in "early American hunter." Both rooms were the inescapable walk-through to the main body of the house and needed a good deal of attending to. The renters wanted nothing to do with this task.

Being long time "do it yourself" kind of people, Ramon and I made several trips to the city dump, then rolled up our sleeves and pulled out the dust pan and paint brushes. A few months worth of general cosmetic work--paneling and shelves painted, drop ceiling tiles torn out, benches re-upholstered and new carpeting installed--things were cleaned up and we were generally pleased with the results.

And this is what the mud room looked like when Jan and I started making use of it to work on a variety of artistic projects associated with events for our children's high school. Two years later, when Austin and Alx graduated, we hung up our volunteer badges, and took up a more "please yourself first," delight directed orientation to all things artistic.