‘THE MAGIC RIVER’ RUNS SOUTH
Mosaic artist James Simon creates another Pittsburgh-Bradenton link
James Simon is in his Uptown studio on a deadline, making his deliriously colorful work look like play — cutting lime green and red stained glass to make eyeballs and ears, slicing mirror glass to make bicycle spokes, laying out blue tiles to further the flow of the Manatee River — panel after mosaic panel that, in late spring, he will pad and stack in a van and drive to Bradenton, Fla.
Mr. Simon is calling the piece “The Magic River.” It is composed of 15 panels that will spread 120 feet across the side of a new building at 12th Street West and Third Avenue West in the city of 56,000 — home to the Pittsburgh Pirates during spring training.
The nonprofit Realize Bradenton chose Mr. Simon over more than 20 applicants.
“James was clearly the top choice of the committee, based upon his body of work and public art projects around the country,” said Realize Bradenton’s executive director Johnette Isham. “Our strategy is to promote downtown Bradenton, to keep it quaint and historic but also to add coolness, so we run events and work with the city on a public art program.”
The work will feature a skateboarding kid, a young man on a bicycle, people at cafes, farmers markets, a couple walking under
an umbrella, musicians with horns and, of course, baseball players wearing black and gold.
“Lots of Pirates,” said Mr. Simon, 64.
As he works on panels No. 5 and No. 6, which cover the floor of his studio, he provides commentary, sharing his thought processes and quirky, sly humor.
“I’m going to make his eyeballs now,” he said, motioning to the bicyclist’s bare face. “A face is better with eyeballs.”
He stands at a light table and uses nippers and other cutting tools to pare sheets of colored glass down to eyelids, eyeballs, ears. “Voila!” he says, snipping, holding up an eyelid.
As he snips, glass falls in little pieces that crunch underfoot. His cat wanders in from an unseasonable day in the garden. The music streaming at the moment is classical.
He selects a piece of glass that looks like the ocean off Bradenton’s Anna Maria Island — aqua-blue-green with some dapples of brown.
“Perfect for a couple of ears,” he said.
His people’s faces are various colors, different colors in the same face. They fit together like puzzle pieces. Their heads are sometimes atilt, and sometimes he stacks glass for the layering effect.
“I break the rules,” he said. “You’ve got to experiment. I’m influenced these days by Matisse. A lot of his forms were relatable to mosaics.”
The hair on the woman under the umbrella is made from penny-sized tiles arranged together on netted backing. People buy them in home improvement stores, mostly for flooring. Other tiles came out of his own kiln.
“Colorful tile is hard to find, and ordering from Italy is very expensive,” he said.
He gets sheets of stained glass from Youghiogheny Glass in Connellsville, Fayette County.
Mr. Simon grew up in Stanton Heights, graduated from Peabody High School in 1972 and went abroad. In England, he apprenticed with a violin maker and made his living crafting the instruments in Mexico and Brazil. He also sculpted.
In a 2011 interview, he described his transition from violin making, which was “kind of my first love. Violin making is sculpture, and for a while it satisfied my sculptural needs, but eventually I needed [to make] arms and legs.”
He branched into mosaic art in 2007 while planning a piece of public art with thenBraddock Mayor John Fetterman and a youth group. It became the “Welcome to Braddock” sign at one gateway to the borough on Braddock Avenue.
“I knew nothing about mosaics,” Mr. Simon said, “but I knew a great mosaic artist in Philadelphia. He sent me everything I needed to know.”
The guidelines for most commissions allow for “enormous amounts of room for being spontaneous,” he said. “It’s the only way I can work. I change stuff all the time.”
His earlier work includes welcome signs in Uptown and Troy Hill, the “Uptown Rhythm” wall sculpture at Duquesne University and the 15-foot-tall concrete sculpture trio, “Liberty Avenue Musicians,” Downtown.
He and artistic friends have turned Gist Street, where he lives and works, into a melange of sculptures and paintings. He has placed ceramic penguins in Allentown, mosaic troubadours in Pirogovsky, Russia, a woman on a bike reading poetry in Millvale and an accordion player in Vallauris, France.
In Bradenton, he will do finishing work once the panels are up. He said he wants to entice people to participate in adding some last whimsical details.
Sculpture will always draw him back, he said, “but sculpture is labor intensive. You need cranes. It is more like construction. Mosaic work is more like painting. And the fun is when you learn something you haven’t done before, like when you discover mirror glass makes great bicycle spokes.”