My Mother’s House: A Photo Essay Part 5

My mother's vision: ballerinas and pinatas

My mother, a prolific outsider artist, began working in acrylics and oils, moving on to mural and collage.

More recently she’s returned to an early medium–mosaics.

My maternal grandmother Tootie taught my mother how to do mosaics when my mother was a bored teenager in need of entertainment. My mother explained, “I asked Tootie one time what I could do. And she didn’t believe in people not being able to find something to do. So she asked me to draw a design. So I drew a watermelon with a lime green background and I made a mosaic of it. And she turned it into a tabletop and put it in the backyard.”

detail: ballerina/pinata

But my mother didn’t make another mosaic until forty years later. “After forty years in the job force, I quit working, so I had more time. And then one day I just walked past the Blue Moon Glass Company and I saw that glass so I thought I’d try one.”
One of her first creations was another mosaic tabletop. This time she created a vision of the world in which two of her favorite things intermingle seamlessly–traditional ballerinas and mexican pinatas. Dancers carefully rendered in bits of glass piroutte and plie around dangling pinatas. “I thought piñatas and ballerinas together seemed graceful,” my mother explained. “And it was two things I really loved, Mexico and the dance.”

Two-headed snake

She went even further back in traditional Mexican culture in her mosaic rendition of the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, which my mother depicts as a two-headed snake. “The Aztecs thought Hernan Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl returning,” my mother explained.

“After Quetzalcoatl, I finally got a little tired of Mexican things, so I decided to do a paisley mosaic tabletop,” my mother said.

It’s that desire of my mother’s to push on to new and fresh subjects and mediums that makes my mother’s body of work so amazing.

Paisley

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