Featured Artist Jonathan Mandell

Enjoy Jonathan Mandell’s delightful mosaic work and see more from this versatile artist by visiting his website.

 

 

I have been producing tactile wall mounted panels and sculptures over the last 22 years for both commercial and residential clients. I think of what I create as being the juncture of painting, drawing and sculpture.

 

 

The tactile quality allows viewers to physically connect with the artwork. The grout lines act as drawing lines, bringing my imagery to life as I sculpt pieces of tile into a painterly image. My mosaics are made using ceramic tile, various semiprecious stones, and hand blown glass shards.

 

 

The glass shards are convex and concave, allowing for a bas-relief effect to form across the mosaic surface. The bas-relief quality can create the effect of rolling hills in a landscape or they can infer anatomical details in a portrait.

 

 

My portfolio is very eclectic, ranging from wild florals to precise portraits as well as many slice of life scenes. The focus of my study has been to create color and design compositions that take a playful approach to depth perspective and spatial composition. Often times a given composition will offer multiple points of view, creating a kinetic quality to the perspective.

 

 

Different visual effects can be created in using the grout line as drawing line including tension, motion, texture and the volume of form. These lines are formed by the shapes of the pieces of color as they neighbor each other. Additionally, I like to add narrative into the composition. Subject matter has included art museums, sports scenes, musical and theatrical images, landscapes, nudes, and abstractions of nature.

 

 

My art can be seen publicly at Citizens Bank Park, home of the Phillies, the National Constitution Center, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, the National Liberty Museum, Bryn Mawr Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania among other locations.

 

 

My website features many examples from my portfolio including florals, portraits, bas-relief, three dimensional sculpture and Judaica. My portrait process involves creating drawings in advance of fabrication. This allows me to show the client how the portrait rendering is going to look. Clients can adjust the look of the portrait via the drawing in order to optimize the final look of the piece.

 

 

I create a lot of commissioned pieces as clients see my portfolio they are drawn to a particular style or theme and then I am asked to design what they are looking for into the scale of their space needs. I enjoy engaging my clients in the design process. often times it leads me in directions that I might not have pursued on my own.

Jonathan has recently written a book about his art, and you can see it here.