A week's worth of my 2005 summer vacation was spent at the Haliburton School of the Arts, where I had my first exposure to the hands-on craft of cutting little pieces of glass and sticking them to a piece of plywood.

My starting point was the picture at left, which is a photograph of one of the many sculptures of Antinous that the ancient Romans left behind for us. After increasing the contrast levels on the digital image, I imported it into Adobe Illustrator, and set my art-board to 3' x 3'. Then I enlarged the picture to cover the entire art-board, and set my page tiling so that it would print out on 12 sheets of paper. After I had cut away the margins and taped the sheets together into a 9 square foot poster, I also taped together 12 sheets of black carbon paper. I laid the carbon poster down on the plywood and taped it securely. Then I placed my poster of Antinous on top of the carbon paper, and used a pencil to trace out the different gray-values, which I numbered on a scale from 1 (white) to 6 (black).

In the meantime, I went to a mosaic supply store and purchased my glass tiles: white, black, and four intermediary colours. I wanted to "warm" the piece up a bit, so instead of going with pure gray, I went with browns and beiges. And then I hauled my plywood, my tiles, and my cutting tools up to Haliburton.

Alas, I didn't finish, and the year that passed between the end of that course and the beginning of my 2006 excursion saw little time to work on the project. But when I did finally get back to it, I was very happy to see it completed. Voila!

Antinous. Glass tile on wood. 3' x 3'. Click on the picture for a much larger resolution graphic.

For those interested in the technique, I used what's called the Direct Method, in which individual tiles are glued to the base one at a time. I like the direct method because of the way the image steadily emerges and comes to life before my eyes. And as a storyteller, that's one of the things I love best about making mosaics: it's an activity that actually has a climax at the end. You work and work and work, and then, when the last tile is in place, you cover it over with grout, and it all disappears. That's the low point of Act 2, when everything looks bleak and hopeless. But then you wipe away the excess grout, and the piece suddenly shines out in the most amazing way. It's a glorious feeling to reveal the finished mosaic after all that time setting the individual tiles down.

If you're wondering why I chose Antinous as my subject, the answer is that he forms the basis of a rather large and somewhat unwieldy literary project that I'm in the midst of creating, called The Sacred Antinous. The milieu in which the storytelling takes place is ancient Rome, and, owing to the Romans' penchant for the craft of mosaic, it seemed like the perfect format with which to render my personal image of Antinous. The Sacred Antinous is an Internet-based project that launched on November 27, 2006.

~ Portrait Head of Antinous Wearing the Wreath of Dionysus 18x24 Giclee Print Buy From Art.com Figure of Antinous, after 130 AD 18x24 Giclee Print Buy From Art.com