Bespoke Mosaics: The 4,000-year-old Art of New Ravenna
In the tiny, historic town of Exmore on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, farm roads and driveways are laid with sparkling crushed Italian marble, and folks are as likely to work as mosaic makers as any other profession. This seeming incongruity of geography and art delights the woman whose own creative prowess makes much of it possible.
Cean Irminger, creative director and master mosaicist at New Ravenna, Exmore’s largest private employer, laughs as she thinks about the confusion this will all cause some future archaeologist, trying to figure out how these dense deposits of beautiful marble turned up on a barrier island on the East Coast of the United States. “We give our leftover materials to our employees,” she says. “They use our stone in their driveways, but also for their own art projects. There’s quite a cottage art industry booming.”
New Ravenna arrived in Exmore in 1991, founded by artist and designer Sara Baldwin on her kitchen table. Baldwin grew up in the area, left for college, returned and launched her company. A painter by degree, Baldwin had no mosaic-making training, and taught herself the artform while camped out in a rental property on her parents’ land. They gave her a $5,000 loan and one year to either start making a living with mosaics or find another career. By 2012, New Ravenna employed about 100 local people and had taken the design world by storm.
Irminger joined the company around that time, another local who’d gone away to school and returned home looking for a job. She’d gone to the other side of the state to study drawing and painting at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, and thought she’d give mosaics a try.
“I learned everything I know on the floor,” she says. A self-proclaimed history nut, she loves the legacy of mosaics, which can last 4,000 years. “We are preserving an ancient craft. The tools we use today are similar to the tools used in ancient Rome. Mosaics are functional art, and each piece had to be placed by hand, which is mind-boggling.”
Irminger tells terrific stories about unusual bespoke tile projects. The first large commission she oversaw was a five-foot tall rabbit, which a client wanted for the bottom of a swimming pool. Another project, a glass-tile mosaic, was painstakingly crafted and shipped out to become the interior of a hot tub/spa. All well and good. Except glass tile is really sharp, and when the mosaic was installed, the edges were slightly out of alignment … which made that spa a distinctly un-relaxing experience. So the piece was ripped out and the mosaic recreated and reinstalled.
Irminger is proud of New Ravenna’s practice of hiring and training local people to become master mosaicists. “Our local area people are all world-class,” she says. “This was such a small company when I started, and it’s a truly home-grown, rural American project.” One in 10 people in Exmore is employed by New Ravenna.
To make a custom mosaic, one of the team’s designers prepares a preliminary drawing. After it’s refined and approved, the next step is sourcing the stones that will be used. A sample of the mosaic is created and sent to the client, and after any refinements, the meticulous process of hand nipping and placing each stone begins. “We use face tape to tape the top and hold the design together. Then we cut it apart and ship it, along with a map of the mosaic to guide the installation,” explained Irminger.
Inspiration for mosaic designs comes from everywhere: nature, ancient mosaics, textiles and travel are all tapped for their artistic fodder. A new collection, “Gracie,” was created in collaboration with the venerable hand-painted wallpaper company by the same name. Founded by Charles R. Gracie in 1898, the New York City-based company is now led by the fourth generation at the helm, brother and sister Mike and Jennifer Gracie.
New Ravenna worked with Gracie to select five of its designs for interpretation into glass mosaics. The designs were chosen to represent international historic themes, from Roman and Chinese antiquity to the late Japanese Edo period, and French Art Deco.
New Ravenna mosaics are available in Oklahoma exclusively via Oklahoma City’s Artisan Tile Studio at 300 W Wilshire.