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An Artful Entrance
“It’s going to be so huge and colorful,” said Carmet. “I feel it’s very child-oriented, playful and happy.” The “Founders Wall,” just inside the center’s entrance, will depict the Manhattan skyline at sunset, with emphasis on Downtown structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, 7 World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. Brightly colored balloons and banners inscribed with the names of major donors will float in the sky above the buildings. The sunset background alone will be made up of over 25 different colors of smalti, the same glass used in ancient Italian mosaics. The mosaic is to be 7 and a half feet wide and over 9 feet tall. Carmet, who has lived in Tribeca for 15 years, has two young children who happen to be active with Manhattan Youth. She lost her Downtown studio just as she took on the project, so she has had to use a make-shift space in Jersey City. She estimates that she has spent 250 hours on the mosaic in the last two and a half months, with at least another 100 hours to go before the community center opening on April 10. “It requires a lot of patience. It’s very time-consuming,” she said on a recent afternoon as she filled in a deep orange portion of the skyline. Using a palette knife, she carefully buttered a chunk of orange glass with a dab of dyed cement. “But it’s also therapeutic, calming. I’d rather do this for hours than analyzing figures or something.” She set the chunk in place, in a row of dozens like it. Carmet’s specialty is a French technique called picassiette, in which the artist creates mosaics with shards of patterned plates. (She says she has 10,000 antique plates in storage, all acquired at flea markets, antique shops and estate sales.) But for her commercial projects, she uses glass. In this case she chose smalti because the irregular pieces will create a glow, as they tend to reflect light from different directions. Carmet is creating the mosaic in 10 sections for easy transport (and also because her temporary studio is too small to lay out the entire piece). Once the finished sections are completed, they will be taken to the center and screwed to the wall. Carmet will fill in the seams, and voilà, the wall will be done. Except, that is, for the donors’ names. One of Carmet’s innovative ideas for the mosaic was to make the banners and balloons three-dimensional. For the balloons, she will cover foam spheres which have been cut in half with strips of stained glass. The banners will be made of wood, also covered with stained glass. The mosaic will thus have a playful, sculptural quality, and more balloons or banners can be screwed into place at any time, as the center acquires donors. Early in the process, Carmet drew her design on large sheets of paper. She calculated how much of each color of glass she would need, and has methodically followed those plans ever since. “It’s like painting by number, you just draw and fill it in.” she said modestly, crouched over the mosaic as the sky, a deep orange fading subtly into pale salmon, yellow and finally blue, slowly took shape beneath her hands.
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