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Interview with mosaic artist,
Marian Shapiro, continued.
What the tools that you use the most?
I use a pair of wheeled mosaic cutters, called Leponitts,
for cutting small things and I use a hammer and a hardy, which are the
tools for cutting marble and also smalti by hand. A pair of tweezers,
safety glasses, a dust mask, a very useful pokey thing which is basically
a metal stick stuck in a plastic handle which is terribly useful for poking
things into small places or getting things out if you’ve done it
wrong. Also tin-snips, glue and cement.
Can you outline the general process behind making
something like the star pattern table in your home and garden gallery?
That was actually quite a complex piece and because
it was a table where you want a flat surface it was made using something
called the indirect method. This means that you can work with materials
that are not same depth but still end up with a flat piece. And that’s
a very traditional method of making mosaic.
So what happened there was once we had the design, which is based on a
traditional Turkish design, I drew that out on a piece of brown paper,
cut all my pieces and laid them upside down on the brown paper and stuck
them there with a flour and water paste. Which is again a traditional
method of doing it. I was also using lead strip in that piece, which differentiates
the different areas of that particular design. So I had several different
types of glass, of slightly different thicknesses, I had some glass tile
and I had the lead strip. So all that was laid face down, in the case
of the tiles, on the brown paper. Once it was finished you do what’s
called back grouting, so you grout it from the back of the piece and you
basically you force the grout down the joints, I use an old toothbrush.
Then you clean off the back because you don’t want the grout to
interfere with the cement, which is the bit that’s coming next.
Then what you do is something, which is called buttering the back, where
you take your cement mix and you smooth it over the back so that’s
it level. So that what you’re doing on that stage is getting rid
of the different heights because they’re covered in a thin layer
of cement. The cement is always the same depth. Then I took the board
that the tabletop was going to sit on, that was actually going to be the
tabletop, you put another layer of cement on that and you use a notched
trowel to give it a keyed surface. Before I did all this what I should’ve
said was that the brown paper was taped to a board, that’s very
crucial. Then you put the tabletop cement down onto your mosaic and you
put another board on top of that, you take a deep breath and then you
flip it.
So it’s the right way up, the board that was on the bottom is now
on the top because you flipped it like an upside down cake. Then you take
the board off what is now the top of the mosaic and you’ve got the
brown paper still stuck on top. What you do then is you take a float and
you bang it down to seat it in the cement. Then you wet the brown paper
and wait till it soaks through, which takes about 15 minutes and you have
to go away when you are doing that bit because the temptation is to start
peeling it off too early. Then you very carefully peel it back, rather
than up and reveal the mosaic. Because the cement is still wet at that
point, what it means is that you can actually make last minute fine tuning
if its gone a bit wrong or if there’s a bit you look at and you
go ‘no no that’s wrong’ or whatever. When you’re
happy with it you spray it with water and you wrap it up in plastic and
you let it cure for about a week. Once that’s done you can take
your plastic off, you scrub the top to get rid of any bits of brown paper
or glue, you might need to do a bit of re-grouting from the top and cleaning
and polishing and that’s it. 
Star pattern low table - Courtesy of Darian
Design
Well that shows there’s a lot more work
in things that it looks.
Oh yes. But it’s a great method because it means
you can get a nice flat surface and you have used materials of different
depth. It’s always useful.
Where do you generally buy supplies? Do you
buy much from local stores or do you mainly order them in?
No I order them on the internet, there’s several
specialist mosaic suppliers in Sydney and I use them. I also get the Mexican
smalti from an American supplier because nobody as far as I know distributes
it in Australia. There are some things I can’t get at all in Australia,
which are deeply annoying, but there you go.
It sounds like you have travelled to some wonderful
places, which ones have you been to in relation to mosaic?
Venice I think is my favourite so far and Istanbul.
I have actually booked myself on a mosaic class in the Ravenna, in Italy
next year, where there’s a school that teaches a very traditional
method of mosaic called the double indirect method, which is very complicated
and I won’t go into it. I am going to Ravenna and Rome then and
that will be fabulous because there are just so many mosaics to look at.
I’d love to go to Tunisia and see the Roman mosaics there, because
that's just fabulous, there’s millions of them.
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