About Anna Meyrick Mosiacs

Creating is an essential part of my life. Since I was a small child growing up in rural Oregon, I have been making art.   My childhood, high school, and college education gave me an extensive arts and crafts background coupled with fine art training. I graduated from Portland State University with a BA in Art & Psychology in 1999.

I am well versed in many mediums and have the ability to mix and match material and processes according to the project.  I spent most of my time creating with the following mediums:  drawing, painting, ceramics, collage, mosaic, and concrete sculpture. 

Historical artifacts, spiritual and religious belief systems, and symbols are a testament to this, and my art is informed by these in their resistance to being static. They open new valences of interpretation in every moment. 

I like to explore how the past and the present are connected—that nothing new is impressed in the fabric of the universe. 

Even the art world is just reworking the threads that were always there: deconstruction and reconstructions of ideas, shapes, patterns, color, and composition. 

In art, the ancient patterns and designs in religious art, Celtic knots, Native American pottery and weaving, even fairies and other creatures exist in a process, of reinterpretation and reinvention. Yet the strands of these never vanish from the art I create, connecting my work to the past. This is a dialogue in art and it circles in perpetuity. 

Out of this dialogue, one becomes conscious of feelings, one’s own and those of others. I am intrigued by the process of communicating one’s feelings and ideas to other people. We might live around people who speak a common language, but words can have different meanings to different people.

The word “dog” might be a positive word to many, making them think of a soft warm puppy to cuddle; to someone else, ”dog” might be associated with trauma or pain, calling back memories of fear. Feelings were in the world long before people had words for them, and art circles through feelings, lighting their crevices, illuminating their shapes.

Thus the creation of art is important because it expresses a story visually that cannot be put into words, striking a cord deeper in the mind and in the spirit. This process of creation brings a familiar object into a new light, fixing new narratives of the past.

I developed a deep love affair with color because of my past. I was born and raised in Oregon—hunting, fishing, clamming, crabbing, camping, and wood chopping.  These activities, like art, are universal and took place in locations all over Oregon: the coast, the high desert, and the forests.

I am fascinated with the colors as they shift due to the season, time of day, weather, and other variables. This is a process and its visual iterations are the things that art is made of. I am in love with the twilight and evening colors, and the elements of magic, spirit, and other dimensions, things we often see with our hearts, souls, and spirits but not necessarily with our eyes. What we don’t see is always more fascinating than what we do see. 

I am interested in the dark areas between colors, the places that go deep, winding and twisting into areas and dimensions out of the spectrum of one’s experience. 

I like to create fresh landscapes, realities, and feelings of something familiar but at the same time foreign: The sublime. The color symbolizes a mood, feeling, and emotion. In pursuit of this, I use mainly stained glass, precious stones, recycled magazines, images, and other paper for my mosaics. 

 I can also create a complete painting, building it with oils or watercolors and then adding the mosaic elements.  I love to incorporate found objects, copper BB’s, custom tiles, personal photos or writing, and anything else I feel the art piece needs to become profoundly alive.

While the elements in my art are not new, as is the case with all art, the process of synthesizing known objects and articles yields magnitudes of which one might never be conscious without participating in that process. 

I gravitate toward nature and some of the darker things found there—bats, spiders, ravens, the moon, light, and color always need to play with their opposites. Life is always a dichotomy, yin, and yang, good and evil, nature and civilization, natural and synthetic, real and fake.

We live in a hyper-real society, in which life experiences are replaced with electronic entertainment and hand-held devices. This process of opposition is a lodestone that coalesces in works of art, and my art is a reflection of this conflict.  

As an introverted person I am interested in the very personal path we must walk down. Each person sees and experiences the world in a different way, yet like all works of art we are all connected. I do believe in the collective consciousness, or shared knowledge, if you will.

 I have always felt the fact that I am a Cancer on the zodiac, and this has had huge sway over my personality, as a Universe Mother, Creator, and protector of the little things.  As a Cancer, one of my roles as an artist is to shed light on the inner workings we all share. 

The process of my art is also a process of working out my own life, finding my own way home, taking the pieces I want and adding them, removing the ones I don’t, creating custom ones that I need for the art to work. Creating my life as I want it to be, this process operates in perpetuity, with the end goal a long way off, obscured by twists in the road, obstacles, and mountains whose peaks are outside the domain of our understanding.

We must scale these nonetheless if we are to live. But the goal is one foot at a time, always trying to keep that vision in front of you. It might waver in and out of focus, and you might start to doubt you saw it at all, but that’s where faith comes in, regardless of your spiritual belief system. It is faith in the process; that is all that is required of us. Try and find the good path—the right path—and keep treading down it.