All is good! Thanks to all your supportive messages, jokes and calls  the dark forces from last week could not get hold of me! On Monday morning Robson and I sanded most of the stones in our garden. It is much better to do this very dusty work outside, and in the tropics it is possible to work outside all year round In the afternoon Cida and I put the trial mosaic onto a wall close to the floor as this will be a similar place for the AYVALIK MOSAIC too. First we filled the gaps with fine sand, then covered the mosaic with tile cement then pressed it  onto the pricked and wetted wall On Wednesday I went to the Vitoria stone fair for one day. Vitoria is a coastal town just 1000 km east from Brasilia, a little bit north of Rio de Janeiro. The amount of beautiful stones was overwhelming and fun to see. Much more vivid colors than in Europe. Especially the blues are amazing. In Vitoria I met with Evren …

This week I lost my inner calm! Given that I have only 2 weeks left until the departure to Turkey I got the panic about finishing the background and making a trial wall installation which I am most worried about as I haven’t put a mosaic onto a wall yet. My neck is so tense and my eyes can not see well anymore.  I really need support! It also was unfortunate that in this moment my family was away and I felt so lonely and scared at night. Consequently I slept bad which contributed to the tension during the day.  Brasil still is foreign for me. Speaking Portuguese needs a lot of concentration for my brain. I visited a turkish colleague of my husband on Thursday who’s father, an apricot specialist and dealer from Izmir, was around. Trying to speak Turkish with him was a nightmare. So frustrating. I am lost in all these languages! But enough of laments. What happened this week? My dear neighbor and mosaic artist Cida helped herself and recruited a …

  There it is – the last fish figure for the AYVALIK MOSAIC. I almost procrastinated its finalization. These figures have been living with me for almost a year now. Every day I looked at them, checked the original photo against my copy, looked closely at single areas again and again, especially the fins. I always underestimated these little things. Yesterday it took me a whole day to put them and the contour line around the whole figure. I worked for eight hours solid until my eyes would not see and my fingers could not grip the little tesserae anymore. These mosaics are lines that interact with each other in shape and color. Beautifully crafted lines and carefully chosen colors and their contrast to each other are making these figures look so amiable and pleasant.   Now the work is more mechanical, setting the background  tesserae and finally installing the mosaic. I am very nervous about the latter as I have not done it in such a scale before. I don’t know how on earth …