Day Twenty Five

Just as I was cruising on the elation stream, joyful to be in the Wall Era, the amount of untiled area hit me. I discovered there is still a lot more to do. Although I was thinking I would grout in with the brown grout on the flower and leaf motifs before laying the white backgrounds, I realize that I will lay all tiles and then grout after all. This means I could have worked flat longer...perhaps. The one benefit of laying the tiles vertically is that I can get back and see the whole and how the various sections relate to one another. Even though the backgrounds will be predominantly laid opus quadratum and opus tesselatum, I want to reserve the option of getting free with the tiles if it seems right. This I can only know with the entirety clear before me. The design is full and active, but I don't want it to be so busy it overwhelms the small space. There should be a sense of calm as well. I want to push the limits as much as possible to give the mosaic life! Too orderly is deadening, too free is unpleasing to the eye. I need to find the sweet spot.

Today I focused on laying down the boundaries of the structure of the design. I ran out of my greens and had to go with gray ceramic, which is the same color value as the green vitreous tiles, the gray seen in the two vertical lines, on to the right and one to the left of the arch. I really enjoyed the "rays" of color in the arch "white" zone. I spent about four hours tiling today. I finished listening the The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. I appreciate her historic inventiveness. The strange thing is that her narrative really comes from a similar wellspring as my own as yet unpublished juvenile fiction novel The Moon in the Morning. Anyone who would read my novel would conclude I was very influenced by The Red Tent, but the fact is I never read it or knew much about the book until now. I saw it in the library in Book-on-Tape form, remembered my friend Teresa had liked it and recommended it, and figured it would make good listening-while-tiling material. In the Moon in the Morning, a character tells the story of Rachel. In Diamant's story the narrative comes from Dinah, Rachel's niece, and Rachel is an important character in the novel.  In my novel, other myths, such as the story of Cupid and Psyche are also retold as part of the wider narrative. Isis, Brigit, Arachne, and Athena among others also enliven the plot.