On the wall to the left of my bed hangs a mosaic that I call The City. I don’t know if I made up the name or if it was one given to the piece by my parents. It’s about 18 inches wide, maybe 30 inches high, and it consists of hundreds of squarish tiles, each a little less than half an inch wide, laid out in neat rows to form a crude cityscape. The top half is made up of even individual rows of uniform color, mostly shades of sky blue, but with some yellows, metallic gold, browns, and darker blues thrown in to suggest pollution or the heat of the afternoon, or maybe the coming of night. In the bottom half, there are clusters of rectangular shapes that suggest a skyline. In this part, there are blocks of orange and off-white and gray and larger expanses of metallic gold tiles. The whole composition is set in a bed of white mortar and framed with a narrow, plain wooden frame of cherry-stained wood with a flat finish.
This piece of art has been a fixture in my life for so long that I don’t remember any details of its creation. I have to imagine my parents, who would have been somewhat younger than the age I am now, hunched over the brown-and-white Formica kitchen table, sorting the tiny tiles and organizing them into rows. I picture Dad arranging the chaotic blocks of solid color that represent the buildings while Mom patiently laid out the orderly pattern of the sky. You can see a little wavering in the neat rows where the two sections of the composition come together. Maybe they miscalculated how many rows it would take to meet in the middle, or maybe one of them was fitting the tiles more closely together than the other. In any case, they found some way to make it work as a single consistent picture.
The City isn’t remarkable as a work of art. I keep it because the colors are pleasing and because my parents made it with their own hands. I also like that it seems outdated, a little retro, and that it gently connects me to every house I ever lived in with my parents. I think there’s something written on the back in pencil in my father’s handwriting, a date perhaps, but the mosaic is heavy and I don’t want to take it off the wall to remind myself what it says. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by that writing again some day—or not—when I have occasion to take it off its hook, maybe to take it to the next place I will live.
I also display it because I like mosaic as an art form, so it’s kind of cool to have not one but TWO pieces in this unusual medium in my room. (I’ll tell you about The Fishies at a later date, perhaps.) My fondness for mosaic might be associated with my Rome fetish. The Romans were masters of the mosaic form at several stages of their history. At the ancient port city of Ostia Antica, a town that was abandoned 18 centuries ago because of the silting-up of the Tiber river, entire mosaic floors were preserved under the mud. They’ve been excavated now, and some of them are still in such good condition that visitors are permitted to walk on them. In the heart of Rome, pieces of intact mosaic floors are visible here and there throughout the Imperial Forum. This stuff could last forever.
A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit about Pompeii. One of the artifacts on display was a beautiful piece of mosaic floor. A simple design made of tiles somewhat smaller than the ones my parents used surrounded a central mosaic medallion of much tinier tesserae that depicted the Gorgon Medusa. A plaque on the wall explained the technique. The central medallion was designed to be removable so that if the owner moved to a new home, he could take the finer, more expensive part of the artwork with him.
I’m trying to imagine the house I’m sitting in as it might look if it were undisturbed by human activity for 20 or 30 centuries. If some catastrophe or sudden change in economic or demographic factors should drive us away from here, and assuming that climate change doesn’t send Houston once again to the bottom of a giant inland sea, how long would The City survive? Exposed to the elements, the wooden frame and backing would probably disappear in just a few decades. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the tiles themselves, and with a little luck, the mortar that holds them together, might survive.
What might some future anthropologists think of my parents’ cityscape? What stories might they make up to explain its meaning and its historical significance? What will it tell some future museum-goers about our culture and beliefs? I like to think about leaving The City for them. I’m sure some of them will like it.
Note: The assignment was to portray a real object with description in the present, memory from the past, and imagination about the future.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Wow, you accomplished this topic assignment spot on. I loved how you described the mosaic as connecting you to all the houses you shared with your parents. This was a captivating read – sweet, rich, imaginative.
I loved this one. I have things my parents made years ago and I treasure them for who made them more than what they are. You really wind the story of past and present so well.