About John “Solly” Sollinger
Trained first in forestry and later in genetics, he spent much of his professional life studying and teaching biology. His scientific work trained him to look closely at patterns, relationships, variation and the way complex systems are built from smaller interacting parts.
Eventually, those same habits of observation found another home—in mosaic.
Solly began working with stained glass and mosaic without extensive formal art training. Rather than adopting a traditional method and remaining within it, he experimented. That experimentation eventually led him to develop what he calls the fluid double reverse method, in which pieces of glass remain movable throughout much of the making process rather than being fixed immediately in place. The Face Behind the Mosaic
The method suited the way he wanted to work: looking, changing, testing and allowing relationships among pieces to develop before committing to them. Without extensive formal training in mosaic, Solly developed his way of working largely through intuition, experimentation and the materials themselves, rather than beginning with traditional rules and then departing from them.
His mosaics are strongly influenced by the natural world. Forests, water, fire, plants, light and landscape appear repeatedly in his work, subjects connected both to his background in biology and to his lifelong attachment to wild places. His approach has also been informed by painters including Van Gogh, Renoir and Monet, whose use of color, movement and light helped shape his interest in creating mosaics that can read almost like paintings from a distance. His work ranges from realistic to impressionistic, often appearing almost painterly from a distance while revealing an unexpectedly complex field of individual pieces when viewed closely. American Mosaics Over the years, Solly's mosaics have received awards in mosaic and all-media competitions and have appeared in books, magazines and professional publications.
He has presented at mosaic conferences, taught workshops in the United States and internationally, served as a juror, and was selected as an Artist-in-Residence at Crater Lake National Park. American Mosaics Teaching has always been an important part of his life. He has said that his desire to teach, more than research itself, was what originally led him to pursue a Ph.D. That interest eventually moved from biology into mosaic, first through workshops and instruction and now through a broader examination of how visual work succeeds or fails. His current work brings those strands together.
In Rogue Review, Solly examines an artist's work as evidence: looking at visual structure, relationships, recurring patterns, inconsistencies and possibilities in order to help an artist understand not simply whether something is working, but why.
His book, How Mosaics Work: Adjacency, Material Fields, and the Making of Image, asks the same kinds of questions on a larger scale, how individual pieces become an image, what happens between those pieces, and how material, direction, value, edges, light, scale and viewing distance affect what we ultimately see. Behind both is an approach Solly has followed for much of his life: look closely, test assumptions, pay attention to relationships, and remain willing to change what you think you know.