How Mosaics Work

I started writing How Mosaics Work because the same questions kept following me back to the bench. Why did one passage hold together and another die, why did a gap suddenly become a line, and why could a piece I loved up close disappear completely when I stepped away?

A tessera arrives with color, value, shape, edge, surface, direction and reflectance, but you already know from making mosaics that none of those properties gets the last word. Put the same piece beside a different neighbor, over a different support or under different light and it can behave like a different piece.

That is why I do not think the image lives inside any one tessera. It develops through relationships among pieces, intervals, edges, light and the viewer, and those relationships can change when we move, when the light moves or when the scale of attention changes.

A lot of the book comes directly from making, correcting and testing work. I kept asking when fragments became snow or fire, why a passage looked convincing from eight feet and fussy from twelve inches, and whether the thing I wanted to fix was actually visible to anyone who did not already know it was there.

I am not interested in giving mosaicists another set of rules to obey. I would rather give us questions we can test against the work, and when an explanation fails that test, I would rather revise the explanation than ask the mosaic to behave.