By LESLIE KELLY
Kitsap Week
It was an old, leaky birdbath in her yard that led Louise Martin to the art of mosaic.
And now, four years later, she’s created garden stepping stones and benches, mirrors, and fine art made with Italian smalti tile.
“I wanted to fix my birdbath,” Martin said. “So I asked my friend what I should do. She lent me her materials and her tools, everything I needed. I had so much fun making that old birdbath beautiful that I decided mosaic was for me.”
For that project, a cement fountain-shaped birdbath, Martin used colorful stained glass and created an orange and blue design. It wasn’t long before she’d finished off a trio of cement stepping stones with bright yellow sunflowers, purple lilies and red roses. From there, she topped cement garden benches — which her husband Clyde Muirheid poured — with stained glass flowers and fish.
In the stepping stones, there are about 100 pieces of glass in each design. There’s more than 250 pieces of glass on each bench.
Each piece of glass she uses she hand cuts and arranges on the base. She then hand grouts and seals the work. Quite often, she’ll add gemstones or glass beads to make each of her works unique.
Her most recent project is a round patio table topped with 3,009 pieces of stained glass in the colors of the seven chakras.
There are blue and green starbursts, with a bright yellow sun pattern in the middle of the table top.
“The table top was a real labor of love,” she said. “It took more than two months, working about three hours every day.”
It was a combination of two things she loves — mosaic and inner peace. Her thoughtfulness and introspective ways, including meditation and yoga, came following a cancer diagnosis two years ago.
“I was highly spiritual as a child,” she said. “Over the years, I did meditation on and off. But I got away from it. I took ‘the gift of cancer’ to get me to thinking about life in a different way.”
Cancer, for her, was “like getting hit by a truck.”
She needed to get her mind, body and spirit in sync as she faced a mastectomy. She also began doing Tai Chi and Qi Gong.
“The stillness helped me,” she said. “And mosaic was wonderful for that. You can really get lost in what you’re doing.”
As she was doing both yoga and mosaic, the idea came to her to blend the two together. She decided to name her business Yoga Mosaics and she began making wall art and mirrors that featured cats and dogs in yoga positions.
She sought out Dan Borris, who makes calendars with pictures of cats and dogs doing yoga. and asked for permission to pattern her mosaics after his pictures.
“That’s one of the things about mosaic work,” she said. “You don’t have to be able to draw. You can use images that already exist and make them your own.”
She’s also created beautiful lotus flower works and the tree of life in wall mosaics.
Mosaic is one of the older forms of art, Martin said. Mosaic murals date back to 100 B.C. Roman and Greek mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings, often incorporating social, entertaining, mythological or personal scenes within wider geometric patterns.
For her works, she buys stained glass in Bremerton at Eastern Wind Stained Glass and from a company in Tacoma. She’s done commissioned works and created family pieces with special meaning, including one for her grandchildren with an image of Babar the Elephant. In that piece, she let her grandson help her decide where to place some of the special pieces like two tiny birds.
Art wasn’t ever something she thought she’d be doing, Martin admits.
Martin has a Ph.D. in psychology and has worked in marketing research, training and development and medical indexing. She and her husband were living in Portland, Oregon, when they traveled to Seattle for a work-related event and decided to take the ferry across to Bremerton.
“When we got here, we decided we wanted to live here,” she said. “So we started looking for a house.”
They ended up in the Annapolis district in Port Orchard where they have lived for about 15 years.
Doing mosaic work with smalti tile is one of her favorite ways to work in mosaic. Smalti are opaque glass mosaic tiles made according to traditional recipes in small batches. Natural variations in shape and color make smalti the ideal material for making life-like mosaics.
And with smalti, there is no grout used. The pieces are stacked to create depth.
“The colors are just so vibrant,” she said. “It comes in a big cube and you cut each piece one at a time. It takes a lot of time and a simple piece can take weeks to finish.”
It’s also more expensive than working in stained glass.
Martin prices her works based on size and intricacy and the amount of time it takes her to complete the piece. A gallery of her work can be viewed at www.yogamosaics.com.
She hopes to create a community piece in the near future.
“I’d like to work with people to create a community piece, a mural, something that will last,” she said. “I’m hoping to attend a class in Berkley where I can learn how to manage that.”
And she’s looking forward to marketing her yoga cats and dogs in the area. She’s always open to creating animal artworks beyond yoga positions.
Her mosaic work has helped her to heal from her cancer and her yoga and meditation brings her peace every day.
She’s looking forward to becoming a volunteer with Hospice and helping others. And she plans to continue to create mosaics.
“Part of what makes mosaic so much fun is that you can do anything you want,” Martin said. “There are no rules.”
