Ukiyotile Works

This series of works is heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the 1800’s and by Spanish modernista architecture and mosaic tiling. The process I have developed to create mosaics, or ukiyotiles, as I have come to term the body of this work, consitsts of three primary steps: design creation, tile generation, and tile coloring.

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The first step in creating a ukiyotile consists of coming up with an underlying design I want to use as source. For this step, I typically create a thumbnail drawing using pastels or prismacolor pencils. I like to work in this intimately small space as a means of exercising restraint and economy of line so that I may keep my ideas focused.

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The next step, tile generation, is the most involved, as this is the stage at which I decide how each individual tile is to work in concert with the underlying design. I have created a set of software tools to help me with this stage, but the process is still very organic, as it involves re-creating the design as a series of “negative” images which I then use to generate the necessary tile arrangement. This is inherently a very iterative process, but it affords me easy access to experimentation, which is an integral part of my creative process.

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The final step consists of cross-referencing each tile to the original drawing in order to assign an appropriate color based on its relative placement in the final design. Using this mosaicing technique, I am able to create works of great complexity in a manner that allows me to focus my attention on the organic evolution of each creation and the ideas that inspire them.