for featured artist
Tuck Contreras

art glass mosaics

Tuck has a long history of making inspired mosaics using stone and tile. Since moving to Oregon’s The Dalles in 2003, she’s been experimenting with a different medium for this, crafting mosaics such as her Grape Cluster for Dry Hollow Vineyards from hundreds of pieces of hand-cut art glass.

Tuck purchases most of her art glass in sheets from Bullseye Glass Company (located in nearby Portland, Oregon), and prefers working with their specialty irid glass, telling me “I just love the luminosity ... the colors.... I love the way it looks. It’s so rich and says so much.” A fine example of her artistic play with Bullseye irids and fused glass is the decorative frame she made for a large mantelpiece mirror in a local home, Mirror in Fused Glass.

When asked, Tuck will tell you she has no idea why she’s drawn to work with mosaics. But I think the detail-oriented and labor-intensive art form is a natural for her, drawing on several aspects at once of her many talents as both artist and artisan.

Mosaics require a heightened awareness of what philosopher-physicist Henri Bortoft calls “multiplicity in unity” (e.g., see pages 82ff. and 248ff. of Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996; ISBN-10: 0940262797 and ISBN-13: 978-0940262799). The artist who crafts mosaics must think in multiple terms about pattern and the dynamic relationships between part and whole. She must be able to think holistically, while also attending to detail, envisioning the one and the many at the same time.

Tuck hints at the creativity in this dialectical dance when she describes the making of art glass mosaics as both “relaxing” and “intense” at the same time.

Head-piece from a book printed at London in 1599, featuring arabesque design.

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MOSAIC PROJECTS ON DISPLAY IN OUR ONLINE GALLERY:

& RELATED Furniture Art Projects (also incorporating glass mosaics):

& RELATED Mixed-Media Art Projects (also incorporating glass mosaics):

art glass mosaics