Man Overboard!

The world of making and selling art moves in mysterious ways. Being a self-employed artist, I never know exactly where my next work is going to come from. Living with his kind of "uncertainty" makes a lot of people cringe, but, over time, I've become very accustomed to the ebbs and flows, and though I do sometimes freak about how I am going to make the ends meet, following my heart--and my art--has served me well in breaking through my own limits to success. I've learned to GO WITH THE FLOW.

Making art is a lot like rafting whitewater: both require that you pay close attention to what is going on in front of you, controlling where you are going, while at the same time anticipating sudden upsets or invisible snags beneath the surface. Water can be very unpredictable, and so can the process of making art.

Recently, a friend who I met in Guatemala contacted me after seeing a photo of "Whitewater Family", a mosaic light painting that I created last year and wrote about, here on my blog. He wrote to ask if I could create a similar piece based on his own photo of a river trip with friends on the Toulame River in California. And he wanted me to do three versions of the piece, so he could keep one and gift two of the pieces. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to explore this theme more deeply. The subject of whitewater is particularly apt for the mosaic light painting techniques, and I was eager to expand my "whitewater vocabulary" through the mix of paint and glass mosaic.

Here's the photo he sent:

Here are some shots of the three mosaic light paintings. The first row show the mosaic side of each piece. The second row shows the painted sides, and the last row are details. You can see that, depending on the illumination and backlighting, the piece can look very different in different lights:

I often work out of doors, partly because my medium is so messy with dust and glass shards galore, but mostly because I like the "plein air" feeling that comes through in the pieces when I work outside. When its a scene of nature, like these whitewater paintings, I definitely want to be outside when I work.

Please contact me if you have an image you'd like to see translated into a mosaic light painting. Most of my best ideas and most worthwhile challenges have come from the petitions of my clients....