Tangerine Orange Mosaic Mirror by Margaret Almon, glass tile, stained glass, gold smalti and dichroic on wood, 10×10 inches.
With my square mirrors, I imagine I am walking the middle path; I am centered between my edges. Establishing the edge provides security that it will all fit. If I let the glue dry before moving onward, then I don’t have to worry about nudging a piece out of alignment. With this one, I chose the outer tiles first, with their creamy tangerine smoothness. They are made from recycled broken bottles and windshields. They are orange, through and through. Then the innermost tiles, smalto from Italy, with a creamsicle swirl. Then I anchor the corners before traveling that middle path, less orderly than the edges, but still more linear than some of my other work.
When I first took a mosaic class and began a project making coasters, I started in the middle and didn’t give myself enough room for the edges. Not every project requires an edge or an anchor, but I am grateful for learning when to make it easier on myself. This happens in my life as well as in my art.
For the third year, Stratoz and I are doing the January Cure at Apartment Therapy, a kind of Spring Cleaning in the winter time. My favorite task is buying flowers. It had never occurred to me to buy flowers when there were none in the garden, and the infusion of color does me good in the bleak midwinter. The less favored tasks include cleaning out the fridge and the pantry. I found a 10 year old jar of turmeric, which in its brilliance still glows yellow-orange. It’s not that we’ve neglected to use turmeric, but that it was a large bottle, and we’ve depleted it slowly, half a teaspoon at a time. It has become a resident of the house, living here almost as long as we have. I suspect a new bottle will knock us over with its hue.
Listening by Nutmeg Designs. Glass on slate, 6×15 inches.
Listening was my natural state as a child. Listening to the adults tell stories to me, or talk to each other above me. I became a writer with my storehouse of listening.
Stratoz and I had a Christmas commission to create a sign with the word Listening for a spiritual director. Listening had become a gift of her vocation, when her natural state was talking.
I was introduced to spiritual direction at the University of Scranton in the early 1990s, where I had my first librarian job. The University had a contemplative spirituality program, and I started seeing an Ignatian nun(as she called herself) once a week. She asked me about my experiences that week, and asked me where I found God in this. Then she would listen. It was as if she was handling a treasure, gently holding it in her hands.
Winding my way around the letters of listening many years later, I am grateful for the listeners in my life who encouraged me, recognized me, loved me, and my desire is to stay true to my listening nature, and in turn encourage, recognize, and love.
Orange Stained Glass Star by Staci Klemmer. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
A surprise gift for me from Staci Klemmer, client and friend ~ a stained glass star, in orange of course! I hung it from the Wall of Lights, which keep me infused with color during the long winter months.
Staci used to live around the corner from us, and we discovered she is a colleague in stained glass with Stratoz. They worked together to create a cross for their church. Stratoz designed it, and Staci made it so.
Cross for Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Lansdale. Designed by Wayne Stratz and Realized by Staci Klemmer.
Random Acts of Piecing by BJ Titus. Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza, 2014. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
B.J. Titus started with one triangle and then randomly chose pieces from her stash of fabric scraps, and the quilt began to take on a life of its own. Random Acts of Piecing is akin to Random Acts of Kindness. Both are about mending and transforming fragments.
Sunflower Mandala Mosaic by Margaret Almon and the Grout Monster
The Grout Monster came over before our open studio. She grouted pendants, picture frames and a house number with ease. Then came the sunflower. The GM removed the painter’s tape after grouting, revealing a berm around the edge. One petal reached past the others and broke through the berm, and she had the inspiration to begin carving the still malleable grout with a blade, tracing all the contours.
She thanked me when she was done. She had found it meditative. She asked me what mandala meant. It is a sacred circle.
Her stepfather had died that week, and she told me about asking the funeral director to put the chairs in a circle. This was the one thing she wanted, that her family could see each other and tell stories about her stepfather.
In her grief, she created intricate beauty, both in the honoring of her stepfather, and in delicately outlined petals.
Sunflower Mandala Mosaic by Margaret Almon and the Grout Monster
Strawflower: Hope in Orange. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
This last strawflower in our garden caught my eye, as autumn fades, a beacon of hope in orange. My heart feels brittle like the dead leaves, with the grief of this world. To notice remnants of beauty is a hopeful act. To offer my sliver of beauty from my studio is what I will do right now, even as I continue to pay attention to the grief, to notice what I see and what I don’t see. Muriel Rukeyser’s poem the Ballad of Orange and Grape stays with me:
Ballad of Orange and Grape
After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’ve read your reading
after you’ve written your say –
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and accross the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth
century.
Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack –
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who’d like to break your back.
But here’s a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose
and pink, too.
Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans –
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on
walking.
I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each
machine.
I ask him : How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? –
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write
and we hear and we say and we do?)
He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don’t
do.
On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
Perfume Bottle Bouchon Mures (Berry Stopper), 1920, Rene Lalique. Corning Museum of Glass. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
Lalique takes the form of a bottle stopper and lets it unfurl into branches heavy with fruit. I imagine the rounded topography of the berries, the bead-like drupelets. I wondered if there was an ombre berry like the ones in Lalique’s imagination, and found salmonberries. Sometimes when I eat raw berries my lips swell like drupelets, but in cooked in a pie I am ready to take them on.
