What is your primary medium?
This is a fully functional mosaic workshop where 40 hours a week we crank out mosaics and products that incorporate mosaic.
What got you interested in working with mosaic?
I actually did an apprenticeship. I had worked in tile before so I had a background in tilework after I graduated from college. I did an apprenticeship that focused on wet application tile, so showers and tubs and pools and water features, fountains, things like that. But initially, as I think about it now, when I was living in Missoula, how I got turned onto it was by a guy who had a lodgepole pine furniture shop. He was doing these hodgepodge mosaic trout on top of these tables and at that time I was a fishing guide and he knew I was into fishing so he kind of brought me into it. He knew I had a background in tiling and at that time I was kind of doing spot jobs, because as a fishing guide you might work in winter doing something like that because you can't fish. So he brought me in and he loved fly fishing. He kind of showed me what he was doing. That was in the fall of 1996 when I was first brought into it. Lodgepole pine was huge at that time so we just kind of morphed those trout in. I mean, that's where I started and now you see here it is decidedly different. But that was a couple decades ago.
Where do your mosaics end up?
Yeah, so that's the beautiful thing about mosaic, it's super versatile and it's an industrial art for all intents and purposes. So that's part of the reason why some mosaic shops are successful and are working all the time because, you know, if you're just trying to sell a painting you kind of limit yourself from a market standpoint. What we have going here is we are able to sell our mosaics in mesh mount form. If someone says “I want that” and they see it online, we just have to tape it down, put it in a box and ship it and then it gets incorporated into the architectural design or wherever it's going. We have framed stuff that goes indoors or out but it's meant to be garden art. We put together these badass frames that are all hand done, they're almost works of art themselves, where the mosaic goes in, and then you can put them outside. Then the stones, you know, the first stone we did was for a That's Clever episode where we said hey, we got to do something different. In my apprenticeship for tile we cut a lot of sandstone. We did a lot of incorporation this way. It's kind of a cool way to incorporate mosaic because there's nobody else that does it this way. We've looked and tried to identify someone that does it similarly. We started doing those in 2006. It's another way to kind of move the art forward. We make no bones about it, we're tile setters first, tradespeople first. We sell it in so many different ways that the art part of it definitely comes second.
So can people order a mosaic and have their builder incorporate it?
Yep. That's usually what happens. People buy what are called panel mosaics and they will call and say, “Hey, we're building a house and we want this and this” and they have some ideas. Then they often have a designer or someone who's kind of driving the bus on what they're incorporating into kitchens and stuff like that and we get the specs from them. They generally give us a lot of artistic freedom and say “This is what we want” and as long as it fits, pretty much anything goes out the door. If we're going to sell one of these things ungrouted they meet NSF certification. So if we send it to a job in Ohio or something, they're going to be able to just put it right in there and it's going to follow all the specifications that anything you buy at say, Lowe's or Home Depot or a tile shop would require, just so we're not having any issues and it integrates really well. But yeah, probably half of what we do is installation work or architectural mosaic where someone will say, “We want this, these are the specifications, these are the colors that we want.” There's a lot of different routes to take when you're doing things like backgrounds and stuff like that. So customers really do participate in the design process, you know, as much as an artist will let somebody I guess. But they pick the colors and the backgrounds and their style. We do rainbow trout and brown trout and cutthroats and owls and bluebirds and monarch butterflies, and things like that. So people get to pick.
How do you get the ideas for your designs?
Really, they're pretty basic. I mean, truth be told, we're not doing anything that's too spectacular that way. Because the beautiful thing is, it doesn't matter what image you choose, it's always going to come out different. It's never going to be like the image, you know. Mosaic changes so drastically that even the most basic image can be turned into something that's pretty. Because again, mosaics have these design elements that you lose in painting and stuff like that, like joints and shaping. You can take something that's basically a coloring book image, and if it's done with the right palette and done with the right style, man, you can take something like a starfish, which is seemingly pretty basic, and with the use of color and things like that, you can turn it into something spectacular. The images are pretty basic, but we have a really broad palette. There's like 10 different blues and 10 different greens, 10 different reds and oranges and golds and stuff like that. Use of color, that comes after the technical stuff of shaping the glass and you can just blend red, orange, gold. The glass is so beautiful in and of itself that even the most basic squares with color transitions, that's the art. It doesn't always have to be a fish or a bird or something specific like that. It can be super basic squares, but just portrayed in a way with color changes that when you look at it from a distance, like wow.
How important is it to have a space to go and work?
Well, clearly we couldn't do it unless we had the space, so it's enormously important. And this is a commercial shop, even though it's at my house, the customers come here, by appointment only, but this has been an art workshop since 2001. So it's super important. It's a small business too. So probably one of the downfalls is that I'm always out here, you know, it's hard to get away from work sometimes because it's always present. But then it's a catch 22 If you've ever done any job like social service or anything like that, the crap you have to deal with here is peanuts relative to that.
What's it like being able to make a living from your art?
Yeah, it's awesome. I mean, again, it's the old adage, you know. I went from a job in nonprofits for people with disabilities to this. I had a huge hiatus and we closed the doors willingly because I took a job in the public sector and a nonprofit organization. I hadn't worked for a long time, a decade. I finally reached a point in 2018 where we re-opened the shop. I go to shows, we do Eagle Saturday Market, and we do shows like that. When someone says why don't you have someone else do that, you know, you can pay them to be in the booth. I do that to some extent, but really, no one's going to sell this better than me. And yeah, it's kind of one of those things, you have to do it. The shows are a great way to have connections with people and to be with people and to get them excited. For classes for example, if I'm sort of excited about the classes, people are going to be down with it. If I'm not excited about it, they're not going to be excited about it. Getting people turned on the mosaic in the beginner classes, man, it's tons of fun that way, and I meet tons of friends from around the world through art through instruction.
You teach people how to make mosaics?
Yeah, so I teach at the Gem Center for the Arts and I'm in partnership with The Lounge at the End of the Universe, Jen Adams, who owns that pub. The Gem Center, if I may give them a plug for a minute. It's a killer, community driven arts community, from studio spaces, to showing art, to galleries, to classes, to theater to music, they have killer shows there, they have comedy festivals and all sorts of stuff at The Gem Center. We were one of the first classes that was taught there. And before COVID, we taught wildly successful mosaic workshops at The Gem Center. And then through that, one of my students turned me on to the City of Star's art program, because I taught for the city of Boise for 12 years. So in the new shop, it's Gem Center, and I teach with the City of Star. We do everything out there and their art program is a little bit of a different animal because the city is involved. So they take a lot of the workload in terms of getting people signed up and the City of Star's mayor is responsible for the creation of the art program. He is eager to bring art to the public. He's eager to bring artists to the west part of Ada County and to their arts program. Having that political will and backing is important for teachers and for getting the community to buy into that. I think they have a really good thing going there.
It’s easy to forget how unusual the City of Boise’s programs are.
It's fantastic. During the Bieter times, I walked in off the streets to Rick Jenkins and said, “Let's start up a mosaic workshop.” So I taught for the city, for Rick, at Fort Boise for over a decade. We were rocking 12 or 15 students every workshop. We did two in the fall, two in the winter, two in the spring, and he supported that. He was in charge of the pottery lab, he ran the entire arts program, but he was in charge of the pottery studio through the city. I literally taught people from all over the world and the city kind of oversaw that. And it was interesting, it was good that way.
Why do you think art is a worthwhile endeavor?
I don't know, man. Because sometimes I even question whether it is. That probably sounds pretty cynical. But for anyone who's ever worked in social service, when you're knee deep in those jobs man? I don't know. It's sometimes hard to get excited about art when there are hungry people in the community. When there's so much discord. It's tough to celebrate stuff when we have so much other stuff going on. But then people argue that art helps us deal with that other stuff. That you're just kind of seeing it from a flawed point of view. That art is actually the link that helps us stay grounded. Music too. But you know, mosaic is the antithesis of playing a song because this takes forever, whereas a song takes two and a half minutes. But you know, I mean, I guess we do art and we love art. I come from a weird cynical punk rock background where consciousness is a curse. I hope it's worth it. But it's hard to celebrate some of that stuff when you see what you see and you're just like, I don't know… Anyway.
What gets you out of bed in the morning and excited to come out here to create?
So this is the third year of this shop and we're busy. And man, when you're working on stuff like this, this is my job. It’s what I do for a living, so you know, there are times I'm just so stoked about finishing these projects where I do have that sort of that, I don't know how to explain it, but spring in your step a little bit. You're ready to go. Because again, it's not always this way, but oftentimes if I don't have anything to do throughout the day, like cut stone or something like that, if I can just work on projects, it's fun as hell. We throw on documentaries and listen to tons of tunes, man. All the tunes are on YouTube in video form. Everything you could ever want, you know? So yeah, I mean it's good that way. Plus you know, I have a mortgage to pay. It's a real job. It's a “Job” job and there's a lot of 10 hour days and 12 hour days because if your name’s on the door you have to do that. But doing this, there's a lot of satisfaction after having worked 8 hours from 8:30 to 5. To come out here at 8 at night with the doors open in the summertime, owls are doing their thing, and working on stuff. Then it becomes more like, I don't know man, like real art.
Is the glass fickle to work with?
In the first shop, so I say the first shop because I've had shops before this shop, we did all ceramic tile because I was a tile setter and ceramic tile is bombproof stuff. Limited palette mosaic, not a lot of colors. But there was enough, and so I was a shaper. A tile shaper is known in the mosaic community for being able to shape hard porcelain ceramic into shapes and things. My hands are sore even thinking about it right now. So just before we closed the last shop, the last big project I did was a fountain that had these feeding trout on it. And they wanted glass. So that's the first project we did, back in like 2006 or 2007, that last project we did in glass. So when we reopened the shop, it was all glass. It is so shapeable. It's so forgiving, stable. And in three years, a lot of the stuff that we've cranked out has been a primer for me to get good at shaping. If you look at our work, I mean, all this stuff is refined down from a big sheet of glass. And when you look at the antenna on the butterflies and things like that, I mean we can shape those perfect shapes. And it's all done by hand. So we are trying to sort of emphasize shaping. We use this specific glass, Bullseye Glass from Portland, and some other brands of glass, we take this glass and shape it and make it a little bit different. We render it a little bit differently. You can tell the difference between our work and someone else's. The ceramic was so hard you know, and this stuff is just super forgiving. It's light. It's hard to explain, but you can shape it into some pretty specific shapes and we refine it. It's never going to be perfect. It doesn't matter how hard you work to refine it, it's always going to be perfect in its imperfections. But the patterning and the cool tactile feel you get, It's really cool that way I think.
Do you cut your own stones?
Yeah. So I learned how to do that for a TV program. I was just finishing my apprenticeship with a local tile guy who was from L.A. His apprenticeship was from an Italian guy in Los Angeles, where he was responsible for a lot of the tile work in the municipal buildings in L.A. Tons of fountain work and sandstone and things like that. To be on this first show, they were looking for artists and we pitched him. They said, “Well, you know, we’ve had so many mosaics on this show, we're not really interested. It's just kind of hacky.” And I said, “No, no, we do these stones. We do something different. You’ve never seen this before.” And explained to them what it was without having done one before. So we pitched them with what these things are now and they said yes. So literally the first five pieces we did with the recessed stone, we call them mosaic monoliths. The first five we ever did were for that show. And the reason we did five of the exact same piece was so they could show throughout the production how it changed from start to finish. But it worked. My guy Greg said, “Now we'll do this, it's gonna be perfect, we can make this happen.” We'd use grinders and chisels all the time already and he was really responsible for pushing us in that direction. That was so long ago. Now it's probably 50% of our work. When it gets fused to the sandstone it's fused with Portland cement, which is a cementitious powder you've seen before. So when it fuses with that stuff, dude, it is in there forever. But the monoliths you know, they're kind of based on the glyphs in places like England and Ireland and on the French coast and Scotland, you know. That's kind of what they're based upon. But yeah man, it's kind of one of those things where not everybody can do it. You see a lot of mosaic stuck on the top of stones and it's grouted and flat. We do a ton of address markers. Yeah, address markers, and pilasters. Like when you are traveling down some old trail somewhere and there's, you know, a way marker, or mile marker. I love that sort of nostalgia. The only other people that I've seen that can do it are specifically trained monument people. We do a lot of flat lying stones, what are called center stones, for big patios with a mosaic that’s fused into the stone in the middle of this 300 square foot stone patio. Things like that, people are like boom, you know?
Do you do anything else with glass or just mosaic?
No, but I am now starting to learn more about fusing glass. Fusing is a little bit of a different animal, but this is Bullseye Glass and it's primarily created for fusing. Fusing is another one of those trades that there's an industrial component to. People fuse sinks and things like that. And so it's the same material, but it's heated in huge kilns with molds and all sorts of cool stuff like that. But otherwise, it's just mosaic man. I mean, it's kind of one of those things you have to give yourself to one component of it and just keep pushing. I'm hoping to go to the Chicago Mosaic School the next couple years because the shaping part of it and being able to cut stuff is one thing, but use of color and things like that, that's something that is good to learn about. You can cut straight lines till the cows come home, but if you use the wrong colors or you could have used them in another way you didn't think of, it's kind of a bummer. That's how you distinguish your work from other people. Because there's a lot of mosaic people in the world. There's a lot of mosaic people just in this town.
Do you think creative work is something you'll ever stop doing?
No, probably not. I mean, I don't know, I was super specialized in my last job and there's still a market for it. But you know, between this and music, the accordion music, the Irish stuff and the world music that the pub band puts out. I mean, we get paid money to do that and if you work hard and gig about, you know, so between that and this I just can't imagine going back to it. Like I said, I did it for 20 years, it's not like I don't have a perspective on it. I guess we'll have to see if my hands hold out, my elbows. Because it's a lot of repetitive motion in your arms. It's like playing the accordion, your arm is always bent so your elbows and your joints just get tired, man. And it's like double duty. My elbows are wondering, What are you doing, man? Why don't you just sit at your desk and not move at all?