Solar Tide” was commissioned by the city of Mesquite Texas in 2005. I won this commission while living in New York city and decided to move back to Los Angeles to fabricate it.



 Over the years of working as a studio assistant directly with trompe l'oeil artist John Pugh, I had developed a concept for illusionary ceramic murals that would combine traditional trompe l'oeil painting with complex linear perspective to achieve a profound visual effect.



        The Vanston Pool project seems to be the perfect location to implement this idea.  You can see from the photos that overwhelming majority of the surface of this piece is flat, made up of very large ceramic tiles painted with glaze to give the illusion of depth. The actual physical joints of the tiles are used to lend linear perspective that reinforces that painted illusion.



FABRICATION & INSTALLATION



       The first challenge to overcome in the fabrication process was to create tiles large enough to facilitate the linear design. Some of the tiles are over 30 inches long.  For this reason the entire surface of “Solar tide” was custom made from scratch. Most of these shapes are very similar so a special templates needed to be created to ensure each tile was placed in its correct position. The painting is layers of ceramic glaze and under glaze. This technique offers its own set of challenges as well.

         The installation process required special steps to prevent cracking as the building settles. The different colored tiles conduct heat differently so expansion joints are used to compensate.





I learned one particularly hard lesson while constructing “Solar Tide”, never let the art work out of your site. One unfortunate evening, just days before installation was scheduled, I had packed and loaded the entire piece into the moving van I rented to hand deliver it to Dallas. I ran a quick errand and got some snacks for the trip leaving the van unattended in front of the pottery factory for a very short amount of time. I return in less than an hour later to find that the moving van along with the entire completed artwork has been stolen.

        I immediately made a police report to the LAPD and a few very dark days later the van was recovered but the artwork was not inside. The whole story was on the local Los Angeles television news.

         I am very lucky that Mike Templeton and the Mesquite arts Council were so supportive and  allowed me to re-fabricate the entire peace out of pocket and continue with the installation with only a 30 day delay.



       Some of the images you see here are of my brothers Dustin and DJ Warren helping me with the re-fabrication process double time.