In recent years, mosaic has experienced a renaissance. But much of what the general public sees falls into the category of functional objects, like tables, benches and garden stepping-stones. There are artists working in the medium, creating groundbreaking works of fine art that draw upon mosaic’s illustrious history as a liturgical art form, while simultaneously breaking new ground in terms of content, size and location. Meet two of those artists, Jonathan Mandell and Gina
Hubler.
Jonathan Mandell
“Movement is often my ultimate expression,” says
Mandell.
For a medium that is usually thought of as static and staid, this unusual approach attracts both collectors of fine art and architects to Mandell’s mosaics. Since the late ‘80s, he has been producing liturgical architectural commissions as well as fine art panels using a process that can be traced back 4,000 years.
After sketching and painting his subject, Mandell assembles various glass pieces, semiprecious stones, minerals, and pottery fragments, matching the desired colors of his design. Each piece is shaped on a wet saw, secured in place by adhesive cement and grouted. Mandell uses his grout lines to accentuate and define the imagery.
He began exploring the possibilities of mosaic while earning his M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania. There he met an Egyptian
painter/mosaicist, Selim El-Sherif, who introduced him to the art form. In the United States, mosaic is often thought of as a medium for decorating furniture and other functional objects. On his 1988 sabbatical to Egypt and Italy, Mandell learned otherwise. He realized that mosaic was as painterly as it was sculptural. And upon his return, he dedicated himself to creating mosaic in its purest form. He established his studio, Jonathan Mandell Designs, in Narberth, Pennsylvania.
In the early part of his career Mandell used mosaic as a decorative element in hand crafted furniture pieces, only later expressing himself in personal, pictorial, wall-mounted pieces. At this point, he sidestepped the gallery scene, focusing his attention on commission-based work by sharing his art with architects and interior designers.
Much of his earlier work was liturgical and inspired by Byzantine mosaic. In 1990, he had a breakthrough with a commission for a Torah cabinet at Gratz College in Philadelphia. This was Mandell’s first Judaic commission. It featured a stone finish with mosaiced pocket doors that opened to reveal the Torah scrolls stored within. Another interesting feature is a built-in eternal light made with halogen lamps behind stained glass.
In 1994, he created a mosaic alcove (9' x 10') in the lobby of Adas Israel Synagogue in Washington D.C., featuring an olive tree. The mosaic wrapped around three walls, enveloping the viewer.
Says Mandell, “Because of the tactile quality of mosaic it is very experiential to be able to feel the surface of the work as well view it.”
The real turning point for Mandell came in 1996 when he was given the first of several opportunities to exhibit at the museum level. He was invited to exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City. A show was being mounted at the time, featuring an archeological gathering of artifacts from the times of the first synagogue (sixth to seventh century). He was asked to make a mosaic tying together the images in the show. With the creation of the mosaic (60'’ x 60'’), titled “Sacred Realm,” he began the journey of making two-dimensional, painterly, wall-mounted mosaics, both liturgical and secular.
With these successful commissions under his belt, Mandell returned to non-liturgical work and his love of figurative, abstract concepts in mosaic form. Works like “Restaurant Interior” (2000) and “Art Museum Gallery” (2001) reveal intimate scenes — people and places, bustling, alive. He pursued the art form, testing its boundaries by creating a series of portrait works.
Many of his subsequent commissions depicted sports-related scenes. In 2001, in coordination with the Chamberlain family, Mandell created an 8' x 3' mosaic portrait of Wilt Chamberlain for Overbrook High School — the basketball legend’s Philadelphia alma mater. Famous Harlem Renaissance artist, William H. Johnson, influenced the mosaic.
“I take great pleasure in my sports-related mosaics because they lend themselves to motion. Mosaic is often thought of as static, and I like to take an opposing view,” says
Mandell. “I push the limits of what one can do pictorially.”
In his 2001 Nisqually series, Mandell takes his interpretation of motion one step further. Using the various convex and concave shards, the mosaic’s surface became rather complex topography. No longer working on a flat plane, the imagery and the use of perspective all played into the construction of the surface patterns, adding a bas-relief quality to the mosaic. These shards came from broken art glass, the result of the destructive force of the Tacoma-Seattle earthquake that occurred in 2000. World-renowned glassblowers Dale Chihuly and Sonja Blomdahl shipped boxes of broken shards to Mandell for use in his work. Through his mosaics, their art would be reborn.
“I’ve seen the restored mosaics at Pompeii, and they gave me the idea to include found or otherwise destroyed objects and reframe them for a new purpose. I hope to do an entire series of work that includes remnants from monumental catastrophes. Mosaic is one of the few art forms that allows such preservation.”
Mandell continues, “I was aware of the earthquake and losses incurred. I tried to think of a way to turn something negative into a positive.”
Although he’d worked with glass before, it was never the majority material until now. The process began with a whitewashed wooden panel. A schematic layout was drawn in to use as a guide. All the glass shards were laid out and sorted by color and size. The shards were full of tonal nuances, which enhanced Mandell’s palette. This palette gently dictated subject matter of the final mosaics: a figurative piece, a floral piece, and an abstracted landscape.
Mandell adhered the shards to the wooden panel bit by bit, and angled them in place, relative to neighbor pieces. As this was an interior application, he used tile mastic to adhere the glass to the board. This mastic created an opaque film on the back of the glass, which controlled the way the light reflected off of it. It also enabled Mandell to angle and set the glass to maintain planar curvatures he wanted on the surface.
To the glass, he added semiprecious stones and minerals to further enhance the imagery. He used latex stucco as grout. Mandell prefers it to cement because it’s more lightweight and flexible.
Two of the pieces, “Nisqually I” and “III,” are on display at The Paul Fisher Gallery, West Palm Beach Florida, and “Nisqually II” in Portland, Oregon, at The Alysia Duckler Gallery. Part of the proceeds from the sale of the mosaics will go to the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, to assist artists who suffered losses due to the quake.
Inspired by working with the Chihuly and Blomdahl shards, Mandell hopes to conduct a workshop at
Pilchuck, Penland or Haystack in his process of utilizing glass shards to fashion a painterly/sculptural image in mosaic.
The artist continues to work with glass in both interior and exterior applications. He has recently recreated Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” on the form of a dog for the Art Unleashed competition to benefit the Main Line Center for the Arts in
Haver-ford, Pennsylvania. One of 50 dogs positioned around the Main Line area, Mandell’s translation of “The Kiss” incorporated ceramic tile, glass gems, and various polished stones.
“I had to invent all the points of view in the full sculptural round while trying to maintain the elegance of the Art Nouveau line, distorted onto a dog form,” says
Mandell. “It’s a different kind of challenge because I had to address rapid planar changes.”
Mandell is now pursuing three-dimensional mosaic and going back to working with galleries. He is creating two deer and three dogs for a show this December at the Camino Real Gallery in Boca Raton, Florida. As with the Klimt dog, these mosaics will also incorporate a fair amount of glass. Mandell is fabricating the forms now and will be mosaicing them throughout the summer. For more information www.JonathanMandellMosaics .com.
Gina Hubler
“My philosophy of art and beauty comes from the principles of color, with light as its essence,” says
Hubler. “Colors meld to form new colors and feelings. I equate color with all that is life, the travesty, depths of despair and deceit, as well as the happiness and rapture, like orgasmic pleasures. Everything that is in the human experience can be described and felt through color and design.”
Hubler was born in Miami, Florida, in 1960, and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch community. Her formal education is in Interior Design, with a degree from Bauder College. She has also studied the art of mosaics in Ravenna, Italy, and traveled extensively exploring many cultures in Europe and Asia.
“With each experience I have taken a bit of inspiration, and gained insight into my creative spirit,” says
Hubler. “I have been a designer and artist all my life, progressing through different media, but my resounding passion is mosaic work.”
Hubler has been working professionally as a mosaicist since 1992. She has been the proprietor of Design Impact galleries in both Allentown, Pennsylvania and Coconut Grove, Florida. She enjoys sharing her knowledge of this resilient art form, and currently teaches classes in her studios in Pennsylvania and Miami. She has been a guest professor for Miami Dade Community College, and taught mosaic for Corning Museum of Glass, and various cultural centers throughout the country.
Hubler moved back to Florida from Pennsylvania a year and a half ago, but maintains studios in both locations. Currently, 80 percent of Design Impact’s commissions are fine art mosaics — murals, walls, and fountains. She creates both high-end residential and commercial projects including her recently completed mosaic for The Falls, a mall in Miami. Hubler used a combination of iridescent and matt glasses, as well as marbles and natural stones to provide visual and tactile interest for this focal point fountain and stage. Fabrication took place in Hubler’s studio over a three-month period. The glass was hand cut and fitted using a life-size pattern drawn on site. This indirect installation on site took five days.
In addition to her mosaic work and installations, she creates experimental art as well as functional objects “with style, and panache.”
She says, “Surrounding myself with objects d’art has always been a preoccupation, whether it be furnishings, fine art, or people. Being a very hands-on creator, I enjoy the feeling of the metamorphosis of a new piece — the stages of its existence, and the final moment when it spreads its wings — hopefully beautiful, and desirable.”
Her work changed forever beginning in early 1999, when Hubler received a studio visit from a “mystery man” - a tall, dark handsome Italian. He had seen Hubler’s piece “Technicolor,” a wall installation, and was interested in this type of mosaic. He discussed with her the different styles of mosaic including Florentine (inlay method), Ravenna (large tesserae style), and Vatican (hard to distinguish from painting). He encouraged Hubler to move her mosaic work from craft to fine art; at this time she was concentrating on furniture insets and mosaic in a Gaudi style working with tiles and found objects to create fun, rustic mosaics. Her “mystery man” provided key places and information with which to start her search on fine art mosaic.
“When he arrived at my gallery, his questions showed that he had an excellent knowledge of mosaics. He was looking for something in me, or my work, which he hadn’t seen in the Northeast United States,” explains
Hubler.
Though not sure how or why this man came into her studio, his timing was perfect. Hubler was at a crossroads in her life, about to go to Italy, and had planned on studying in Ravenna, as well as living in the countryside near Spoleto for as long as she could sustain this lifestyle. This man increased her awareness of the different “schools of mosaic” and encouraged her to study with the Vatican studios. He directed Hubler towards their school, as well as to the Florentine countryside to visit one of the masters of this style. He mentioned that his great grandfather was one of the founding fathers of the Venetian Smalti community.
Hubler describes herself as the type of person to research and study a subject relentlessly. During her time in Italy, she lived, breathed and slept mosaics. At the northern school in
Spilimbergo, she was fortunate to spend time with some of the professors learning commercial applications and reviewing their program in which students are immersed for up to five years. She studied in Ravenna learning the restoration methods and techniques that they are known for, as well as the history of Byzantine mosaics, preserved in the area. She ventured to Venice and enjoyed speaking with the Smalti makers, learning of their heritage and love of this special glass. While staying in Abano
Terme, she was introduced to DelNegre, a local artist, whose mosaic and steel sculptural towers reach into the sky, “his use of the Venetian Smalti refreshing.”
In Florence, Hubler learned of the “Pietra Dura,” a school of mosaic brought into vogue by the Medici’s appreciation during the Renaissance. She met the Tacconi family, Florentine masters willing to share their art form with its painstaking intricate cuts and fitting. They use semiprecious stones, which have been found along the Arno for centuries, and search worldwide for the perfect colors in today’s marketplace. “This is one form of mosaic which I cannot imagine creating,” she says.
Venturing south to Rome, she met with the director of the Vatican Mosaic Studio. Unfortunately, no longer a teaching school, they still produce for clients throughout the world, as well as preserve the mosaics in St. Peters. Their style and use of Smalti Filati produces “painter like” mosaics, which are difficult to differentiate between an actual painting in many cases. Says
Hubler, “This studio has an incredible color library; the work produced here is phenomenal. Their studio has examples of some of the finest mosaics in the world.”
As Hubler’s time in Italy drew to a close, she prepared to return to the United States. She knew that her experiences and studies there would be the basis of her work for some time to come. She wanted to share her experiences in Italy and what she had learned with others.
“Being able to create mosaics in the countryside of Spoleto was one of the most peaceful times of my life. The Italian lifestyle is such a fertile environment for creativity,” says
Hubler.
In 2000, Hubler started her “Mosaic Tour of Italy.” For the past two years, she has taken small (eight person maximum) groups on a 10-day artistic pilgrimage, with a focus on mosaics, including a three-day workshop in Ravenna. (For information on the tours www.Design
imp.com.) “I look forward to my journeys in May and November, seeing old friends as well as finding new mosaics,” says
Hubler.
Hubler is currently working on a residential wall inspired by Matisse’s “Goldfish and Sculpture,” as well as a sculptural signage project for a village in Miami Beach. She will be teaching a Masters class at her Pennsylvania studio November 18 through 20, and an Intensive workshop in Miami September 23 through 27. Upcoming exhibitions include “Artist In Residence-Gallery 212” in
Cocowalk, located in Coconut Grove, Florida, on an on-going basis, as well as at Studio Gallery Napp in Weston, Florida, opening September 2, 2002. Her studio in Miami is open for viewing by appointment; call (800) 557-3444.
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