#Gold tesserae install#
#Gold tesserae professional#

Although the work I do is clearly inspired by Byzantine painted icons, mosaic is a different medium.

#Gold tesserae professional#

What principles did we apply making the mosaics? I have been a professional icon painter and church artist for over thirty years, working in egg tempera, fresco, stone and wood carving, and for the past five years, mosaic. Absolutely no joins were apparent in the end. My assistants and I then spent a month screwing these to the prepared wall and carefully filing with smalti the spaces that we had deliberately left around the joins. These panels, all 900kg of them, were then carefully crated and air freighted to St Georges. The edges of our “jigsaw’ pieces corresponded to the edges of the figures, so no joins arbitrarily ran through garments or flesh parts. It is made of aluminium honeycomb sandwiched between two layers of glass fibre enforced epoxy resin. The supporting panels were Aerolite, a super light but very stiff sandwich system developed for the aerospace industry. Our mosaics were so large that we made each work in about fourteen sections. When the adhesive is fully set the cloth is removed with hot water and scrubbing. We also coloured the different areas of adhesive to match the corresponding area of mosaic: red behind the gold blue-black behind blue mosaic, and so on. We used Mapei’s Adesilex P10 with their Isolastic plasticizer, with the addition of a fine fibre. Mortar is spread both on this back and on the permanent surface (wall or panel), then the two gently pressed together. The mosaic is then pealed from its temporary panel and the lime removed from its back. When the work is completed an open weave cloth is glued on top with animal glue. We used smalti from Orsoni and gold from Dona Murano. The tesserae are set directly into a temporary bed of lime putty in the studio. Unlike the reverse technique, this method allows the mosaicist to lay the tesserae directly and therefore to bed them at the optimum angle to achieve the maximum play of light. How did we make them? I had taken a course under Luciana Notturni in Ravenna and learned from her what I call the double direct method. It had been a two year journey from design to this day.

#Gold tesserae install#

Right there and then he decided that he wanted us to make his church’s mosaics.ĥ00,000 hand cut tesserae later, my assistant Martin Earle and I were ready to fly to Houston, Texas to install the two massive mosaics, each measuring 4.9 x 3.6 metres (16 x 12 feet). Thanks to the marvels of the internet, he had found on my website a mosaic that my assistants and I had only just completed for St Martin’s in Cardiff, Wales. His parish was extending its church, and he wanted two large mosaics of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection to fill the new east walls created by the renovations.

It all began with an email from Father James Shadid, the priest of St George’s Orthodox Church. St George’s Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas