Rudolf Steiner School

Mosaics
by Stephen Sagarin, Faculty Administrator

A mosaic image dissolves into abstract shapes when you look at it closely--triangles, circles, squares, and rectangles of pure color. The image coheres as you step back to take a look at the whole.

The newsletter (you hold) is called Mosaic and it is a mosaic, as well. The work of many people--parents, students, teachers and others--lacks meaning without a larger context, and this newsletter, produced by parent volunteers, offers one context which our community can be seen whole.

I used to take my students to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St. Paul in Hempstead, New York, each year, to study the church architecture and the brilliant mosaics. One day we were fortunate to visit when Bruno Salvatori, world-renowned for the quality of his mosaics, done in a pure style handed down from master to apprentice for more than a thousand years, was at work. He is a compact, friendly man, an Italian who speaks little English. He moves economically, bending over a tiny anvil to break Venetian glass into precisely shaped pieces with a small hammer. Dozens of aluminum trays of glass, each a different color, surround him as he works. The most frequent color he uses, because his work is in the Byzantine style, is gold, pure gold leaf on the surface of clear glass.

To portray an eye in one figure in one panel of one mosaic might require 30 pieces of glass, each a different shape and nearly each a different color. Using flour and water paste, Bruno glues these pieces face down to a full-size drawing or cartoon. Hour after hour, day after day, he builds up an image, piece by piece. Strangely, because of this upside-down way of working, areas that will appear gold in the finished work look green--the green of window glass seen on edge--while the mosaic is under construction.

When complete, Bruno presses each panel firmly into fresh mortar, the tiny glass pieces bonding to the wall of the church. Water and a stiff brush remove the paper and paste when the cement is dry, and a glittering mosaic in Turkish or Cypriot or Greek style shines the way it would have had it been done a thousand years ago.

Our Mosaic represents the economical, artistic, painstaking work of the members of our community. Like Bruno's work, the glittering gold of our achievements is often hidden for a time while necessary processes grind on, hour after hour, day after day. It is good from time to time, in festivals and assemblies and, especially in publications like this, to scrape off the paper and paste, stand back, and look at the whole.

Please join me in thanking parent volunteers Heather Bellow, Ditte Ruderman, Jennifer Currie, Heidi Handel, and Mary Campbell Case for this beautiful new publication.