I love finding pieces of art that I’m smitten by and re-creating them as mosaics. When you duplicate something in a different medium, there’s no pressure for it to look exactly alike – and that gives you the freedom to discover new things about it, like when you hear Johnny Cash covering a Nine Inch Nails song or a folk band covering hip-hop. I love Paul Klee and his painting Park Near Lucerne — since the original is well out of my price range, I recreated it with tiles. I need to figure out how to take a better picture of the mosaic —the tiles it’s made of are shiny in a way that’s difficult for me to photograph.
The original is called Nahalal — it is an aerial view of an Israeli agrarian community by Gal Weinstein. It is made of carpet (!) and is almost 13 feet in diameter (also !). Mine is made of glass and is a mere 24 inches wide and hangs above the fireplace. Nahalal actually translates to “partly cloudy,” which refers to a couple of 3D cloud puffs which hover above the original floor-mounted installation.
I love this painting by Alfred Manessier, called Nordic Spring, done in 1954, so much that my imitation of it is in my living room. That’s just a color Xerox of the original. Google some of his other work — I think it’s very beautiful and underrated.