Adelia Ladson
January 30, 2008 10:17 pm
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MOULTRIE — Karen Sasine sees the world in terms of geometrically shapes that she can fit together piece by piece into a mosaic work of art.
“I’m passionate about it. I can’t get enough of it. I can spend hours upon hours upon hours a day doing this,” she said.
Sasine said creating mosaics is like putting a puzzle together except that she is creating the puzzle pieces as she goes. She said it takes patience and she feels like she gets “into a zone” when she is working.
“When a piece fits, it tells you,” she said as she cut one of the pieces of Smalti glass.
“Glass is such a wonderful product that people don’t know enough about. It’s a natural product and I love it,” she said.
She also said, laughing, that Band-Aids are a staple in her studio and she does cut herself all the time.
She has been creating mosaics for four years, although she said she has been an artist “forever.” She got started by just taking a workshop. In the past four years, she has immersed herself in the craft, creating a studio in back of her home.
“I think mosaics fit my personality,” she said.
She also said it allows her to be creative in so many different ways and still stay within in her craft.
“Mosaics are very personal. It’s almost a spiritual process,” she said.
Sasine belongs to a group called mosaicartists.org, which includes about 4,000 artists internationally, and she said she consults the masters online with every piece that she does.
“The Internet has brought the community closer together,” she said.
She won a trip to attend a two-week Orsoni Mosaic Master Class in Venice, Italy, at last year’s Society of American Mosaic Artists (SAMA) conference and she said this was the most intense training she has gotten.
The two-week master class was focused on the honing of her craft from sunup to sundown that featured instruction from Italian mosaic masters. While there, she said she worked only with the Orsoni Smalti, which was the type of glass used to create the mosaics in Byzantine churches in Italy.
“When I first got to Italy, I walked into a church in Ravenna and it brought me to tears,” she said.
She said she learned about cutting the glass and about color but right after the workshop, she said she still wasn’t sure exactly what she had learned.
“But it’s really when you get home that you start to apply the information that you learn,” she said.
“When I got back from Italy, I found a new sense of concentration and focus from my Italian experience. It was the trip of a lifetime for me,” she said.
She said there were not that many people in the country who do mosaics on the level she does. She considers herself a master in her craft but felt like there was always more to learn.
She was recently honored internationally for her Smalti piece, “Asian Garden,” which will be on display at the Colquitt County Arts Center during the month of February and then go to Miami, Fla., in April for the Mosaic Arts International show.
“What Smalti has done for me is it’s allowed me to perfect my artistic abilities. How to translate ... using glass ... how to translate what’s in my head or what’s in my client’s head,” she said.
Just recently another one of her mosaics, “The Wonder of Innocence,” was accepted into the “Global Perspectives” show at The Atelier Gallery in Miami. She created the mosaic piece of the Packer mascot that is on display at the Colquitt County High School, and she created the mosaic for the floor at the Blue Sky Grill.
Sasine teaches workshops at the Colquitt County Arts Center and will be offering a mosaic workshop on Pique Assiette, which is a broken china, on March 1 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and March 2 from 2 to 4 p.m.
“The class is for anyone who has a special piece of china or pottery (or we have a bunch to chose from) and wants to make something fun with it,” she said.
“I love it, I love it, I love it. It’s just such a passion of mine,” she said.
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