The Salton Sea mosaic, explained
I get a lot of questions about this mosaic,. Why do the shore and water look like this?
The Salton Sea is a dying body of water,. It is the result of an accident, when water being diverted from the Colorado River broke through a gate and flooded the desert basin in Southern California, back in 1905. There is some inflow from nearby rivers, and rain, but it has no outlet. As a result, the lake—the largest in California—is increasing saline and filled with the polluting outflow from nearby agribusinesses. It still hosts a huge variety of birds and even some fish, but every year it gets less and less able to sustain life. I visited the Sea in January 2008, and fell in love with its alien landscape.. Once a water resort area in the middle of the mojave desert, Bombay Beach is now a derelict town, and the “beach” is comprised of fish and bird bones, a couple of feet deep, that one walks over when exploring. It is an indescribable place. I gathered a lot of fish bones, because of their sculptural beauty (and because I do that sort of thing), and kept them.
Years later I decided to do a mosaic, of the sea, and decided to approach it from the sky. I looked at a series or aerial photographs, and then took elements from each to create my own aerial view of the sea. The water, from the sky, looks black with green edges, because it is so still, has no currents, and because it is so full of nutrients from the runoffs that come from nearby farms. I used black, and deep and medium green smalti to make the water, leaving the surfaces of the tesserae flat and reflective. the cream marble (crema marfil) is the bone and salt shore, and the black runnels coming down into the water are those areas that are scoured by the acids in the runoff. There are bones from fish and birds found at the sea in the mosaic, and the gold areas are mysterious reflective streams I saw in the aerial photos. Various stones and shells have been used, too, because there are areas of rock around the sea. This is just one area of the huge sea, which is nearly 8,400 square miles in size..
This mosaic was a joy to make. A couple of these close-up photos are from when it was a work-in-progress, including one where Oscar has a good sit-down in order to better critique the piece. He mostly approved. It’s made with crema marfil and Rosa Portagalo marbles, smalti, 24k Orsoni gold in green and various golds, beads, shells, mica, bones from birds and fish of the Salton Sea, pyrite, quartz, and more! 24” x 18”
The Salton Sea has been declared an ecological disaster area, but little has been done to rescue it. It continues to dry and salt up,, endangering the birds that still live there. And it is a moonscape here on Earth, with its eerie beauty., both natural and manmade.
