AN AWESOME 10 YEAR LABOR OF LOVE ON DISPLAY AND FOR SALE … TAKE A LOOK AT REAL ART.
on 04/01/2010 at 09:39 AM
That’s a fantastic accomplishment, and easily worth 10 times the price mentioned.
On the other hand, I don’t understand what they did ...
A replica in the original limestone would have been too heavy and expensive so instead the Woodwards scoured the country to find clays with suitable natural colours.
Um, nonsense?? The replica is housed in it’s own special building. The point of the whole thing is that it’s a FLOOR, not a horizontal wall hanging. So the “doing it the real way cost too much” doesn’t seem like a valid statement. And you can see that the thing has several cracks in it ... is it done in pieces? Is it mounted on plywood or something so that it’s movable? Is it just made of bits of Play-Doh squished into place, and not really a mosaic after all?
The thing about mosaic tile floors is that they are permanent. GLUED DOWN and then grouted in place. You can sell them, sure. By selling the building that they’re in! It’s all handmade.
Movable mosaics “don’t compute” ... although if that’s what you want, computer aided machinery could build one of these in about 3 hours. Think of each tile as a pixel, chosen from a palette of X colors and Y shapes. Design your mosaic, input the picture as a bitmap file, and wah-lah! A color matching algorithm and a “best fit” algorithm would select the tile, and a machine very much like those used for surface mount electronics manufacture could place them. Those machines work so fast they’re a blur. An intermediate step would spread or spray some mastic on the tile’s back, and later on a grouting machine would follow the gaps and apply just enough grout of the proper color. Ok, the bitmap file format would need to be enhanced to include axial angle info for tiles laid down as parts of curves. So it would be a bit more complex than a simple width by length graph. And you may need to allow each “pixel” to be one of several shapes. But it wouldn’t be that much more complex. Heck, you could integrate a custom computer controlled tile cutter into the process, maybe with lasers, so that curved and triangular tiles could be made on the spot. That would allow you to get the grout lines down to just about nothing, so the whole mosaic could be given a spray of clearcoat at the end which would seal it and hold everything in place forever. A layer of clear resin would make it waterproof, allowing these mosaics to be used in pools and hot tubs or outdoors. Swanky! Neo-neo-classical!
Hey, I just invented an entire new industry and a manufacturing process there, didn’t I?
Really, this mosaic is incredible. As was the original. But the whole concept behind it is the same as Pointillism, art done one dot at a time. And dots are pixels. Put them in a grid and make each point small enough, and you could make mosaics that were like high resolution photographs on a grand scale. Like HDTV only 20 times bigger. The only limitation would be the color of the stones you had to work with ... and if you allow glazed tiles, then that color pallet is nearly infinite.
04/01/2010 at 11:01 AM
