If you’ve ever wondered why the starving artist is a cultural cliché, my personal theory is, that’s because they have to buy art supplies.  Every art form and craft medium apparently has its share of medium-specific paraphernalia.  Even something as ordinary and every day as cooking can generate and support an entire retail industry.  Sure, you might start with a few basic sauce pans, frying pans, mixing bowls and pancake turners, having only the most basic need for a way to apply heat to your food, but before you know it, you’re on to brioche molds, ice cream machines, hand-held submersible mixers, marble pastry boards and madeleine pans.  A dedicated artist might start with the basic supplies in the early phases of their love affair, but as they become more proficient, they’re convinced they need every specialized gadget, every shape and size of paint brush, and a tube of paint in every color every paint manufacturer on earth makes in their search for  ‘the right tools for the right job.’  It’s not only the novelty of a new art form itself that fascinates me; it’s all the cool paraphernalia one must accumulate in order to work in it. 

So far, I’ve been lucky.  I haven’t been seduced into any art or craft form that requires a spinning wheel, a floor loom, a table saw, or a ceramic wheel and kiln.  I would like a proper artists’ drafting table, but presently have no place to put the thing. Lord help me if I ever took up woodworking and cabinetry—I’d have to annexe the neighbor’s apartment.  Buying a piano is pretty much out for me, as like the table saw,  it's another large, noisy thing.  Pottery is my brother Alan’s department—in ceramics, he found his perfect medium.  I have very little affinity with clay, and concluded early on that three dimensional art was not my forte.  So fortunately, I have no large blocks of carvable stone lurking around in my tiny apartment, and no chisels, hammers or power tools, either.  I stuck with painting and drawing.  Not a hard choice, as I acquired an early fascination with my childhood crayola crayons.  But drawing and painting are habits that can produce a stunning amount of mess and clutter if you keep at them for any length of time. In my dining room, I have a cabinet and drawers packed full of my watercolor painting equipment; books and magazines on painting and drawing technique; pads of watercolor paper of various sizes; my big Rubber Maid plastic tub of watercolor paint tubes from Caran d’ache, Holbein, and Windsor Newton;  my travel painting kit; my brushes,  my sketching pencils,  my boxes of pastels and colored pencils, my kneaded rubber erasers, and my vine charcoal sticks. All the fruits of my years of trips to art supply stores and the products of my lifelong fascination with art supplies. Thus far,  , my recent interest in photography appears  to be satisfied by my lovely little digital camera and having Photoshop Elements installed on my computer. Thank goodness.

In my bedroom, at present my desk chair is surrounded by library books on mosaic techniques and projects. Back in April while I was struggling furiously to put those infernal rear baskets on my bicycle, I put a heavy tool down on my glass-topped patio table with more than the necessary force, and crash. This was not a terrible loss—I rarely sit out on my patio, and the circular piece of glass topping the little iron patio table was  grimy beyond the ability of any household cleanser to clean satisfactorily no matter which one I tried or how hard I scrubbed. I inherited the little patio set after my grandmother passed away in 1994.. It consists of the table and two matching iron chairs.  Although one can sit in the chairs, the set is more charming than functional, as the chairs were made for someone with very short legs, and the table is the sort of thing you set your glass of iced tea and your magazine on rather than a table where you could eat a meal al fresco. Nevertheless after a childhood of breakage and spillage, I had that old familiar guilty feeling of “Crap! I broke it! Now what do I do?”

“Make a new table top out of mosaic,” my Inner Artist piped up immediately. I squashed that little voice down  for the next month, thinking I’d just find another glass table top somewhere, at the hardware store a patio store, or somewhere.  I knew the danger of listening to my Inner Artist--it's always expensive, but also knew the discussion wasn’t over. Especially as the weeks rolled by and my motivation to go hunting for glass or plastic table tops—small ones seem harder to find than large ones—went nowhere.  But I know this Inner Artist of mine, and her fascination with buying new stuff in order to experiment with a new artistic medium.  I know too, that my Inner Artist would get a kick out of working in mosaic if I'd  just let her. And the results would look much cooler than a boring old piece of broken glass. But buying the necessary supplies to even get started was going to be fiscally painful.  As a compromise, I borrowed some books on DIY mosaic projects from my library.  The books both fed my enthusiasm for tackling a project, and my alarm over what I’d need to purchase and where I’d buy it from.  But I loved the look and feel of mosaic and began to think more and more fondly of a nice little tiled table top on my back patio. Curses be on the head of that Inner Artist of mine!

            The mosaic books all seem to agree I’ll need the following basic supplies; Tesserae, whether of vitreous glass, unglazed ceramic, marble, or smalti, or possibly, out of artfully broken dishes; safety equipment such as a bucket, a mask, safety goggles and rubber gloves; drawing equipment—well, that’s not such a problem, for me—a craft knife, tracing paper T-squares, compasses, triangles, layout paper etc etc; a work surface such as a backing board out of fiber board or plywood in the required size, adhesives for fixing the tesserae to the board,  grout, tile cutters, a trowel, hammer and chisel, a grouting squeegee a spatula and a sponge.  Oh, The Encyclopedia of Mosaic Technique added casually, ideally, I might want to set up a workshop in my home dedicated to mosaic making.  Somehow, I doubt my landlord would approve, but there’s an idea for my next life.

            Mosaics are not my only current source of artistic trouble, either.  On Sunday, I went shopping for a birthday present for my sister Ann, an ardent quilter.  She’d acquired her fascination for quilts from our Aunt Jeanne, the other avid quilter in our family.  Aunt Jeanne had made a wedding quilt for each of my brothers when they married  that were so beautiful, you’d almost think it worth marrying a complete stranger off the street in order to get one.  Every time I visit Ann or she comes visiting, she always has a quilt project going, sometimes more than one, as she’s fascinated with art quilts and her skill has grown exponentially.  She now has a dedicated sewing room in her house in Weaverville.  Whenever I’m with Ann  or Aunt Jeanne, I have to keep my Inner Artist in a near headlock to keep her from galloping off to buy a fancy sewing machine and a couple hundred miles of fabric.  I’m sure if I left the door to Quilt Country ajar by even by a milimeter, I know I could get sucked right in, and there's no escape from Quilt Country. 

      The quilt store where I went shopping was no help in controlling my pesky Inner Artist. Quite the reverse. I had to drag her away from the corner dedicated to the Japanese print fabrics fast before she had time to grab more than a few fat quarter yard fabric bundles, or she would have talked me into attempting a king-sized Japanese-themed bed quilt. The racks of spools of every conceivable color thread were incredibly seductive to her, and then, there was a whole room dedicated to notions. Cutting boards, rotary fabric cutters, angled rulers, curves, quilting pattern templates—my Inner Artist wanted one of everything.  She’s a lot like my Inner Republican Heiress in that way. I think they were ganging up on me in there.  And then there were all  the books on quilting with ideas for enough quilts to warm up a Siberian gulag in January.  My inner artist wanted them all.  In retrospect, I was lucky to get out the door for only $42.00.

Ravenna Mosaic Detail--Empress Theodora

            Ambition is another problem for me when it comes to new art mediums.  I never seem able to grasp that the term ‘beginner’ actually does apply to me when I start experimenting in a new medium.  Being a reasonably skilled painter after years of practice unfortunately does not mean I’m also a reasonably skilled mosaicist. I don’t want to just stick down tesserae, in a simple beginner’s color scheme and pattern project, mind you.  Oh no, that namby-pamby stuff is not for me.   I’m the sort of fool who wants to reproduce a Pompeiian wall mosaic made by some ancient, now very dead Roman master mosaicist:

 Or some intricate geometric Islamic art patterns from the dome of the Hagia Sophia or the walls of the Alhambra Palace in Spain:

 Alhambra Palace Mosaic Detail

      The same problem applies in quilting.  I don’t want to make a safe, boring old patchwork quilt for my first project.  I want to make a broken star pattern quilt, or something else equally spectacular and daunting: 

    My love of the intricate and the complex has brought me to artistic grief and frustration many times in my life.  Not for nothing did my high school friend and fellow art class denizen Sarah Elkind give me the nickname “Details.”  I think I got the better end of that bargain though.  Sarah’s art class nick name was “Squidjigs.”

“Start small and work your way up” is a valuable artistic lesson if one I keep having to learn the hard way.  KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid is not a concept I grasp naturally.  I keep having these images of a mosaic consisting of a blue and white Islamic pattern of seven interlocking circles, or maybe of white and orange mosaic carp perpetually swimming in a flat green pond. Or maybe I can combine the quilting and the mosaic lust by rendering a lonestar pattern in tesserae for my patio table--

PLEASE!! STOP ME NOW BEFORE I TAKE UP A NEW ART MEDIUM!