I'm on the Birds of Texas group on Facebook. This photo, which I have cropped on the left and added lines, was taken by a gentleman named Ed Ferrin in Galveston, Texas. I love herons. We get them around here but I haven't taken any picture as lovely as this. I wanted to see whether I could possibly create a two-part mosaic with a top panel and a bottom panel (the reflection). Based on what I've learned from previous mosaics, I am doing the real heron in opaque glass and everything else will be transparent stained glass. I spent a lot of time cutting up tesserae and sorting them into little containers. I have every color and shape I may need, though I am sure I will need to cut more before I'm even finished with the first part. I like making my mosaic on mirrors. It provides a simple, solid background that reflects light. But unlike clear glass, I cannot just put my pattern underneath the glass. However, I still have overhead markers leftover from teaching so I made a grid and sketched out the heron. I tried to follow the direction of the feathers in placing the tesserae, but I couldn't do it every time. The different shades of grey of the wing, back and upper legs are all from the same piece of stained glass. The only translucent glass on the heron is in front of the eye. I just didn't have an opaque yellow-white glass. That bit is from the same sheet of glass that provided the lower part of its bill. I basically was able to get the variety of colors I needed and am satisfied with how the heron itself turned out. But in many ways, that was the easy part. The water... the water is more free because I am not trying to be just like the original photo, but that means it can also go wrong and ruin the piece. But I began.... Admittedly I am trying to take color cues from the photo. The water is more green glass on the right with highlights of grey and blue, while on the left it is more grey with highlights of green and blue. I took my project outside to get better light; you can see the colors better here. Sometimes I think you can see that I am making wave patterns, but other times it looks messy to me. The larger of the two yellow sections on the left will probably be removed. I think it's too much. My intention will be working in more blue as it moves up, with some yellow highlights, but I think the yellow will need to be used sparingly.
I am concerned that there isn't enough color contrast and the heron will be washed out like my painted bunting. However, I am hoping that if I hang my mosaic where there is good light, the contrast between transparent and opaque will be enough. I want that sparkling, coruscating effect that is difficult to capture in a photo. But maybe... maybe this glass will do it. And yes, I have thought of not totally filling in the mirror. I could do that. And I probably will make some like that in the future. It would certainly be easier and faster. Not to mention potentially profitable. I can tell you that filling in this whole mirror is slow and tedious. Well, maybe not truly tedious because I do find it relaxing. But I'm betting I have at least a couple more weeks minimum to finish filling this in. I am going to grout. I walk past the blue flower mosaic every day and like the look of the grouted yellow/gold glass. Maybe one day I will play with resin. But for now, I want to feel connected to my Roman/Greek ancestors. (I am half Greek; I feel half Pompeian, but I'm not sure that counts.) Stay tuned for the finished project.
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Like the Romans, I have been taking my cue from nature. I needed something simple, something that would allow me to focus on setting the tesserae as tightly as possible and to worry less about design. I had been disappointed (but not too terribly so since it was only my 2nd mosaic) in the painted bunting on the sunflower. There was not enough contrast between the bird and its background. The hedgehog mosaic used opaque glass for the hedgehog and clear for the background in order to improve the contrast. I thought I had my the contrast problem beat until I grouted. I realized that even though the gaps I was leaving were small, they were still big enough to alter the color and design. So, this was to be my experiment with how tight I could glue the tesserae and still grout. My flowers are stylized and simplified. I used the yellow gold clear glass for the background with pale yellow foggy glass for the wind. The single big leaf is opaque glass like the flowers but I made the grass from transparent green glass and used a few tesserae as sort of artistic accents or something. Here is the mosaic before grouting. I almost didn't grout it because I liked it so much this way. However, the whole point of this mosaic was to see what the grouting would look like if the tesserae were tightly set. (Here is the final product. Overall I was pleased with the the grouting. However, in my efforts to not have excess glue, there were places that clearly I didn't have enough glue and the grout got underneath the glass. (Mainly lower left area.) That was unforeseen. I have it on my wall by my front door. I think it still looks neat and is definitely my best mosaic so far. But maybe... maybe I won't grout the next mosaic.
I had this idea that with retirement would come art classes and workshops and new people. But of course because of Covid19, we are all doing things differently. So I have struck out on my own with making mosaics. My first mosaic was based on a photo of Pompeii, taken by the wonderful Prof. Sophie Hay. I liked the warm light of an early morning over the ruins with, to me, the focus on the road leading in. Looking at this photo even now, I get tingles and want to walk down that road and enter that amazing little town from another lifetime. I'm sure there are ghosts of ancestors there who would speak to me. For some reason, perhaps in my quest to try to do something interesting with light, I picked this photo for my first project. With generous retirement gift cards in hand (and a mask), I headed to Blue Moon Glass to purchase tools and glass. Glass isn't cheap, but it is pretty, especially once you start cutting it up into 1/4 inch size tesserae or smaller. There was and is something oddly therapeutic just cutting up the glass and making pretty piles of gems... I purchased some small square and round mirrors to use as a base. For my first endeavor, I grabbed one of the little 5 inch square ones and started gluing. I had to do a lot of simplification for the background, the vegetation, and most of the ruins, but I thought my gate and street were okay, at least before I grouted it. I spent about a week trying to decide whether to use light or dark grout, and after a suggestion from an experienced artist, I went with dark grout. Admittedly, I was disappointed but not discouraged. I thought the dark grout really cancelled out the lightness of the road as well as highlighted all of the problems and inconsistencies. But you gotta start somewhere. Next I turned to nature, thinking like a good Roman. I have always admired the frescoes and mosaics of birds in Pompeii and elsewhere, so I found a suitable photo for inspiration. I liked the challenges this image posed plus it included colors that I already had. Whereas with the first mosaic I started at the top, this time I decided to start at the bottom to try to get the sunflower right. I drew a grid pattern on the image to better visualize spacing and relationships. This mosaic is actually larger than the first one, probably 7' X 7'. As I said, I started with the sunflower, which began pretty rigid and aligned. I then worked on the flow of the leaves with some success, I think. As for the bird itself, I started with the outline of the chest/body in the normal square tesserae but soon switched to the skinny half-size pieces. I really should have gone back and replaced that original row with other skinny pieces, but didn't see that at the time. The beak and the head, I thought, looked a little better before grouting. I am learning that everything looks better before grouting, but more on my thoughts about that later. I think I was doing all right on relative perspective and size until the bird, which is a little off. I'm not too displeased about that. After all, I was not tracing a pattern since I was working on a mirror and not glass, but was eyeballing it. Finally I wanted the background, which is blurred in the picture, to have a feeling of flow. And while it does have that, it does not provide the right contrast. The bird is totally lost in the green because they are the same value (that may not be the right term). They are both strong colors. To get an idea of the relative size of the above two mosaics, I decided to include a picture of the two on my wall in my kitchen. Admittedly the opaque glass stands out better than the transparent colors, so I thought for my next mosaic I would just make certain that whatever was the focus of the image was in opaque glass and the background in the transparent. I chose as my subject for mosaic #3 my son's hedgehog, Cyndaquil, curled up in a ball. I saw in this very typical hedgehog pose a relatively simple design. And in my execution (at least before grouting), it's cute and the little hedgehog seems to pop out. I was very pleased. I loved how bright and cheerful the blue circle edging was. I had been very careful to keep my spacing even. And making the hedgehog, after the face was done, was relatively easy. I had this brown opaque glass that had several different shades. Thus all of the spines you see were from the same sheet of stained glass. Admittedly, I was worried that the spacing was too tight, compared to the nice spacing I had in the blue area. The only area I felt needed real improvement was the area of blue adjacent to the spines. It lacked consistency and I thought was way too tight, maybe too tight for the grouting. But otherwise, I was very pleased ... until I grouted. I chose white grouting this time because I thought it would help keep the piece light and airy. I had been concerned that the charcoal grout of the first mosaic and even the grey of the second mosaic had made the images darker than they could have been. What I didn't realize was how the white would totally wash out the image. I clearly had a lot more space in the spines than I was seeing before grouting. The mirror had been reflecting back the browns of the tesserae, even the ones that seemed more pale on top were really more brown on the bottom. And the face, which I thought would stay white, now looks cloudy without the light reflected in the mirror, plus it has significantly more space between the brown tesserae that I thought. And it is difficult even to see the eyes and the ears. It's hard to even recognize that there is a face there. It was deeply disappointing.
The one positive thing with what happened is that it is very clear that the blue tesserae adjacent to the spines still clearly have space for grout. Even where it is really tight at the top, there was still space for the grout. In other words, I needed a lot less space for grout than I thought. And this space, properly called interstices from the Latin interstitium (space between), has been one of my big problems. I have been underestimating just how critical this space is in my composition. Or rather, I knew, but didn't realize how far off the mark I still am in its size relative to the tesserae. There is nothing wrong with the spacing I've got in the outer rows of blue if that is the look I want with that amount of white from the grout. Or to put it another way, I've been okay in envisioning the space, but not the color in the space. I want to work small, I want to have small projects that I can complete and learn from. And if my tesserae are small, then my interstices really have to be narrow/tight or the color of my little tiles is lost. I will probably try to color or stain the white grout among the spines to see if I can save mosaic #3. Then I will experiment again with mosaic #4 (another circular one, but this time with flowers), and begin designs for a more ambitious mosaic #5 (with a heron). And perhaps I will find some more to read on the subject. (I wrote this post back in 2017. I still think it is important, even more so with the growing push for more spoken Latin / Comprehensible Input.) We are the new scribes. To Macron or Not to Macron, That is the Question--no doubt. It is a question that comes up quite a lot, and it came up again today.
A discussion began privately (small group email) regarding how to add macrons when typing in MS Word. Various people suggested this keyboard or that, but I piped in with how to map keystrokes to make it easy to type. Here is how to do it for those who still don't know how: You need to assign keys to the macrons. I use ALT plus the vowel; ALT plus SHIFT plus the vowel for capital vowels. So do this: Go to: INSERT menu SYMBOLS MORE SYMBOLS & find the letter you want. THEN choose SHORTCUT KEY (bottom left button) in the "Press new shortcut key" press ALT plus A (for a lower case long a), then ASSIGN Now you can just hit that combination of keys and the letter appears. I can type almost at full speed with this. But then someone I love and respect threw in his two denarii that he doesn't use macrons. And while I respect his view and know I will never change his view, I'm always thinking about the new teacher or person I can influence. So I wrote this in return: ... I fully believe in the importance of learning the sound of each word of Latin that enters my head, and the macrons are just representations of those sounds. I don't need them for the cases; those are totally internalized. But when I meet a new word--which for our students is ALL THE TIME--I want to be able to look at that word and, because I know the rules for dividing and accenting words, be able to know immediately what that word SOUNDS like and to fix it in my head. Children can ask parents how to pronounce English words. I can ask my Merriam Webster app to even pronounce words for me. But Cicero isn't here, and in my room I am supposed to be the authority. I am supposed to be modeling the best Latin I possibly can. I have heard presenters at conferences mispronounce words putting the accent on the wrong syllable because they weren't aware of (or, dare I say, didn't care about?) a long vowel. And it isn't a long vowel, remember; it's the way the word SOUNDED--and it can and does change where you accent a word if it is in that penultimate syllable. I certainly have friends and colleagues who are more fluent than I am conversationally. (I was never good at small talk, and always went to bed earlier than others at Rusticatio.) I like to listen to Latin though. I like to read it aloud too. And I want to sound as Roman as I possibly know how. I did dramatic interps for JCL in high school, which I'm sure influenced me. But I was also influence by the great Rick LaFleur in this regard (see what he says on pronunciation in Wheelocks), and I notice that Nancy Ll. and Justin SB ALWAYS (or certainly almost always) include macrons. The more words I *fix* in my own head, the easier it is to read without them when a text doesn't have them. I don't rely on them like a crutch and I tell my students why I always have macrons on materials and how they too should be fixing how the words sound in their own minds. Or trust that when they had macrons in front of them, that they were, even inadvertently, building a proper mental representation of that word so that when the macrons aren't there they can trust their gut instinct on the word. For teachers who think of this as an onerous task, I say to just take it a word at a time. Reading aloud with thought and care and really "tasting the words" as I believe Rex Harrison once said (his argument against speed reading) is half of it. Taking an extra few seconds to check a dictionary on the words you are unsure of is the other half. And while the macronizer isn't bad, I would never rely on it. *** New teachers and those of you who train teachers, this is important. When I was first teaching middle school Latin, I started by deciding that I would do my best to master those words used in the textbook, and I would master those sounds with each new set of vocabulary I introduced. I learned with the students. You often do--that is, as a teacher you often learn a lot of your trade while teaching. There are many, many things not taught at universities, or things that are unimportant to professors who are more concerned with the subject of their research (not being critical, just observant). But we are entering a new age of Latin teaching, where incorporating speaking proficiencies to help develop reading proficiencies is becoming of greater importance than ever before. There is no more critical time to CARE about how Latin sounds and why we have macrons. And yes, Romans didn't need them because they WERE fluent, they WERE able to ask mom and dad and their teachers how to properly pronounce a word just like we are able to in English. And since we can't surround our students 24/7 with quality spoken Latin, we do what we can to make sure their INPUT is quality. So I include macrons, practice a little divide & accent from time to time, and tell them that when they read Latin, they should either read aloud or HEAR IT in their heads. The craziest thing happened. I retired from teaching Latin this year.
I have been pretty seriously burned out for a while now, whether it was from teaching on block scheduling, stress over certain aspects of my Latin program, commuting, or just getting older. It is giving me time, however, to live like a human being. Since spring break I have been eating breakfast at my table and not in my car. I get 7+ hours of sleep each night. And I have begun to make mosaics out of stained glass. There is something very soothing about about snipping the glass into tiny tesserae; something meditative and relaxing about slowly gluing the tesserae into place. I haven't even grouted my first mosaic yet, but you can see the cut glass in the headers of my new website. I am in the process of shifting all of the materials and things I had on my previous website(s) to this website, so if you are looking for a special set of Google Slides I've made on dividing and accenting or SID SPACE, they will be available again soon. I hope. I also had problems with my previous blogsite which had been an emergency shift after I discovered that livejournal was Russian controlled! So if I can, I will repost some of the things I wrote in years gone by when I was filled with energy and passion. So, keep watching this space. Or not. But maybe I will be finally rebuilding things... on top of the ashes of the end of my career. |
AuthorRamblings of a retired Latin teacher, creative creature, and general person rediscovering life after teaching. Archives
August 2023
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