Desert Mosaics

It seems that much of my art work is inspired by place these days - place, or the environment, the world around us.

Tonight I started working on a set of desert-inspired mosaics. I've done a good number of pieces that are about water and these next two or three will be about the lack of water. I spent a lot of our hike in the Mojave a couple weeks ago thinking about how I would represent a desert in a mosaic- not the Mojave, per se, but the idea of a desert...

Tonight's work was mostly selecting and cutting stone - sandstone, marble, slate and onyx (tans, browns, oranges, reds and grays) - and choosing glass (reds, oranges, blues, grays and black) that will blend well with the stone I have selected.

The small piles are individual sandstone rocks that I picked up in the Mojave. A couple of the rocks have a really cool layered coloring - I think it's from baking in the relentless sun out there. The outer surface of the rocks have a patina-like coloring that is very different from the inner parts.