Ellen Blakeley's shattered glass mosaics
Yesterday, I wrote about Ellen Blakeley's amazing mosaic composition Meredith that won Mosaic Art Now 's Best in Show juried competition for 2010. For Meredith, Ellen took shattered glass and applied it as a mosaic to a section of live oak bark.
With Ellen's skillful hand and practiced eye, that piece of bark appears to be iced over with a subtly-colored frost straight out of Lewis Carroll. That piece is at once Alice's looking glass and at the same time it's the glorification of what it is to be a tree.
Ellen Blakeley commenced working with shattered glass mosaics within the '90s. She was strolling down a road close to her domestic in San Francisco whilst she got here upon a vandalized bus shelter. Somebody had shot out the protection glass window of a bus refuge with a BB gun and the shards lay sparkling at the sidewalk. She picked up a handful of the glass pieces and with a bit attention she determined a new path for her art. From a vandal's careless destruction on a San Francisco sidewalk, a frame of lovely work changed into born.
Ellen Blakeley makes show-stopping fine art mosaics, that much is true. Her work's also available in custom colors, shapes and sheets for use in homes and commercial spaces. You can buy her work through a network of tile showrooms nationwide and they are listed on her website here .
What follows is a sequence of snap shots from Blakeley's current collection. Imagine how some of those styles might look as a back splash, a wall or a fireplace surround. My mind reels from these things.
What an amazing and original idea these patterns represent. Any part of this collection would add depth and a story to a lot of the projects I work on. You know, sometimes you just need a little of that Looking Glass mystique. You can see more of Ellen Blakeley's collections on her website . Go take a look and let me know what you think.