My new French Adventure - Mosaicing in Provence 2024

Here I am once again in southern France at one more mosaic project. I really hadn't intended to come here or no anywhere while Loring was on his wilderness trip this year. until I saw that two of my favorite mosaic tea hears were doing a other workshop together and the dates coincided with Loring's trip, I couldn't really saw no. so I am once again in Avignon where I spent a sojourn six years ago with Valerie and Laurel at Valerie's: atelier on the outskirts of Avignon. this time it's a little different. we are not making pieces for ourselves but rather a collaborative mural for the local school which we will install at the end of the week. And we are not going on trips organized be the instructors which is fine.I dont feel the need to revisit those places although I am glad to have visited them, especially the hospital where Van Gogh had committed himself, and our wonderful picnic in the lavender fields. I am much more content working on a group project and spending time by myself In my charming accommodation in the former abbey or cloister or whatever it once was. More research needed and more about it later. for now I'll say that I am quite pleased here. ******************************************** It is now one week later. The project is finished and I am now ensconsed in my apartment in Paris for the next two weeks. I will try to encapsulate the major points of our wonderful week and hopefully catch up to the present before it procedes too much! I stayed for the week in Villesnueves les Avignon, basically a suburb of Avignon. It's the same town where our whole group stayed in the Hotel L'Atelier six years ago. This time, Valerie had reserved for me a room in a nearby b&b called the Cloitre. It was part of an old church compound that the couple had purchased about thirty years ago and turned into accomodations. I was not only the only one from our group staying there, but the only one at all. Which was wonderful. There were a couple of larger apartments with kitchens, and I guess a couple of other rooms that I didn't see. They gave me the choice, and the one I selected had the most charm. It fronted on a little courtyard that I only sat in once, to eat the second half of a salad I'd purchased earlier in the day. It was corn and avocado and tuna and the longest grain rice I've ever seen. I'd bought at when we took a lunch break at the atelier, part of a set meal that included a drink and a dessert, a beautiful raspberry tart, one of my favorites. I knew I couldn't eat the whole thing, and the tart wouldn't travel well back to my home, so I ate half the salad and brought it home for later. Only trouble, I didn't have a fork and was at first at a loss as to how to eat it. Came up with the idea of using one of my hair combs, which actually worked quite well. in Chez mois, the owners sat with me every morning at breakfast and we chatted in French a great chance for me to practice since they spoke very little English. They were very interested in the mosaic project, and every morning I showed them pictures from the day before. My breakfast consisted of coffee, oj, slices of baguette, a crosissant, yogurt, a pear, and apricot jam made by Mr. Host, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. Her name is Michele with one L. (as she told me.) Our group itself was over half French speaking, which was great. They were almost all French, with one German woman, Carola, who has been Valerie's friend for about thirty years. And there was Marjorie, who is French but has lived in Portugal for a number of years. She had driven the seven hours from her home in two days. She gave me a ride to the atelier the first few mornnings, until her car became too full with things she was bringing back to Portugal so that she didn't have room for me anymore! At least four or five of the group had cars, very different from the previous group I'd participated in, where we all came from abroad. Of the five Americans, three of us had New Mexico connections, an odd coincidence. Nancy lives part of the year in France, where she and her husband have a 200+ year old home, and the rest of the year in Taos. Pat had just moved to Truth or Consequences (yes there's a story behind the name that dates back before I lived there 50 years ago.) And I was the third, having lived in Albuquerque for five years in the 1970s. The project was five days long. At first it seemed to go so slowly, not in a bad way. I was just amazed at how much we had accomplished in just the first two days. And then the rest went so quickly, it was over before we knew it. It was a mixture of presentations by Laurel, a prolific mosaic artist for about 30 years. I will try to scoot back and write some more just about her later. and the rest was very hands on. Everything Laurel said was translated into French by Valerie and sometimes Carola. This was great French practice for me and everyone, I think, some of the others in English, because we all heard it twice in our own and the other language. And as someone pointed out, it was also great in terms of reinforcing the technical parts of things as well, to hear it twice. The lessons were about materials, both for the tiles and the adhesive andd grout, the techniques of cutting and placing, the tools, and much more. And everything was interspersed with actual hands on activites, first to experiment,then to actually start creating the mural. Laurel had already created the design, on paper. It used a mix of ceramic and glass tile, and mirror, some precut, others, for the background, were pieces of tile that we cut ourselves. We used Laurell's technique of taping. First, we laid clear contact paper over the design. Then we pressed the tile tesserae onto the contact paper, using Laurel's drawing as a guide, but not sticking strictly to her drawing, using it more as a guideline. With the contact paper pieces were easy to remove and replace where necessary. We did the mirror pieces first, having sliced them into thin strips. It was almost like doing the outside pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, although the mirrored lines didn't totally form a frame, but were interspersed with the design. We used some hand made ceramic pieces that Valerie had made, And Jan had made and brought, at Laurel's request, some pieces from home that she had made and that we all salivated over. Several folks asked her if she sold her handmade pieces, which she said she did not. But on the last day she gave us all little gift bags with several pieces for each of us. And we all said we'd share how we eventually used them. What a nice surprise. I think Jan was the oldest person in the group. She was turning 79, today I think. She seemed much younger to me, not just in looks but in spirit. There was at least one other person older than me, perhaps more. Most of the others, I would guess, were in their 30s and 40s. We had cut the design in three pieces, two outer rings and one center circle. The center sections had five of us working on each, and the center had two, with Valeries and Laurel supervising and suggesting. We had to make sure that each outer grooup had the same configuration, and in some cases, had to adjust. On the fourth day, we sliced each of the outer pieces in two, creating five total, and covered the top of each completely with a stronger clear tape. We then transported them all, along with all the materials for adhering and grouting it to the wall at the Jules Ferry elementary school in Los Angles, where Valerie's studio is located, about a ten minute drive from there. We had marked each piece with numbers and line to insure they went up properly aligned. The yellow wall, under an overhang adjacent to the school playground, was then spread with thinset, the adhesitive, to the outline of the design Laurel had previouslly sketched on the wall. This is one of the trickiest parts. The individual pieces, even in five segments, are heavy and took two to three people to carry over to the wall from where we'd laid them on the ground. And once they are pressed into the wall, there is limited abililty to move them. In the midst of this process, the children came out for recess and most of them stopped to watch, clearly entranced. We later found out that the school had decided to take the class pictures in front of the mural this year.For me, this was one of the most special parts of the whole process. It would be one thing to have the mural entirely installed when the children first saw it. But them watching us do it, at a couple of different points in the process, hopefully has given them an investment in the piece, and maybe a motivation to do something artistic themselves. The final parts of the installation involved pressing every tile into the thinset base, then carefully cutting and peeling away every piece of the outer layers of tape. And then, the last day, mixing and applying the grout. There had been some discussion about grout color because the color the grout can seriously effect the image of the mosaic. Laurel had originally gone for terracotta, but then rethought it and decided on gray. But Valerie convinced her to stay with the terracotta, which she, and I think everyone, in the end was very pleased with. I don't know what the gray would have looked like but the terracotta looks beautiful. I asked and found out that there are apps that will show you what your finished piece will look like with different grouts, which would be interesting to see for some future project. The final task was to sponge away all the extra grout (because you first spread it over the entire piece) andd lastly, to scrape away any amount that have clung to the tiles rather than just in the joints between them. We did that with small wooden scrapers. The next to last night we convened for champagne and tapas at L'Annex restaurant in Villenueve, a short walk from my delightful accomodations. And the following day, with the mural installated and grouted, we had a potluck consisting of wonderful vegetable tartes, patisseries, fruits, and much more, including, again, champagne, to toast ourselves and the project. I left early the next morning, yesterday, by train back to Paris, where I am now.