The first mosaic I was aware of was on the foyer floor in my childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. Directly behind our house was an alley and on the other side was an abandoned tile and stone yard. My brothers and I spent hours collecting leftover tiles. I made my first mosaic in the lid of a shoe box and I have been making mosaics ever since.
Recently I purchased an old violin from an estate sale. I wondered if a mosaic would work on such a delicate surface. Several weeks later I had finished my first mosaic violin. My husband remarked that he thought it was very nice and that it needed a name. So, he named it “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakme by Delibes.
My husband is a former member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and a retired member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and a great source of ideas and suggestions. Often one of us will think of a piece of music and I will attempt to interpret the music through a mosaic design. It often takes weeks to search for just the right items to compliment the music, to research the background story and finally lay the design on the violin.
I hope you enjoy listening to the stories that my violins have to tell.
~ Sylvia Harwood