Two Traveling Teachers

Thank you Fund for Teachers for giving me the opportunity to be the flag holder during the National Anthem at the Texans game today!

When one goes to Spain, Flamenco dancing is a must see
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The artist who taught us about mosaics is now in Washington D.C. for the annual folk art festival at the Smithsonian. Here is a write up about her. She as so sweet and a great artist.

Painting with Tile: Spotlight on Mosaic Artist Lívia Garreta Here in Barcelona, “trencadís” mosaic makes up much of the city’s modernism.

In order to make a historic and stylistic comparison between Gaudi's modernist mosaics and ancient mosaics, we toured the Museo Arqueologico Nacional today and saw their excavated and well-preserved Roman Hispania mosaics...essentially where mosaics began in Spain. Can you see the difference? Could you teach the difference? Though roughly the techniques are the same, the style is completely different. There is only about 1600 years difference between the two! We think the Romans had tiny hands or good tweezers! Their pieces were as small as a pencil eraser or smaller. Sheila commented, "can you imagine asking the artist when they were going to be finished?"

I have a new appreciation for the art of mosaic’s. We will have a lot of work to do, but excited to get started on our project at Deepwater JR. High. Here are some beautiful examples of what we saw in a museum in Madrid!

After spending the morning visiting Park Guell and exploring Gaudi's mosaic works, we left inspired to learn how to create public mosaics for our own school. Antoni Gaudi is one of Barcelona's beloved artists. The city gave him free reign to create his art and architecture. We couldn't wait to go to Livia Garreta's studio to learn how Gaudi created his mosaics and have her teach us how to create one for ourselves. Livia is a respected mosaic artist in Barcelona and has been working with this art form for over 30 years. She calls them "stone paintings." Livia has restored Gaudi's mosaics in La Sagrada Familia and has created her own originals that are in locations all over Barcelona. She was recently selected by the Smithsonian in D.C. to participate in an upcoming festival. We showed her photos of our school atrium and discussed the goal for our students and community. Livia gave us technical direction and taught us how to transform the benches located there into works of art. It was an amazing experience! Terri Shelley See

Lots of inspiration here! Park Guell Barcelona

We had a wonderful time this morning at Park Guell! This afternoon we have our first mosaic class with Livia Garreta.

FEATURED WORKS - Livia Garreta The pictorial of the mosaic. The mosaic is a stone painting for eternity. The musivària, the art of mosaic is versatile and has multiple applications … it’s poetry. The mystery of the beauty caught us. In our workshop we perform … Continued

About 1 week until the big trip, we will be posting from June 17-29!