Elizabeth Veglia
is renowned for her colorful and fluid mosaics. She has lived a
lifetime of art and thinks in terms of light and line and
hue. Numerous
mosaics, paintings, and sculptures have found their way around
the world from her studio.
Born in New Orleans, Veglia’s early years were
spent on the Mississippi coast where
golden summers manifested day-long forays to the local pier
netting blue claws and swimming in the soft waves. Walks along the
sandbars, sunrises and sunsets in watercolor splendor
developed a multihued backdrop in her mind. And the art came
forth, first as childish crayon pictures, then better with
paints and brushes.
College brought
opportunities for art in many forms, then a drafting course,
which she took to tighten up line quality in paintings. Apparently, the
process worked because not long afterward, she surprised
herself by landing at a Dupont plant creating technical,
mechanical drawings for a while. But always were the
paintings, watercolors, oils, and
acrylics.
In Nashville, Tennessee the opportunity to
do mosaics presented itself in the form of a large public art
project, a mosaic-covered sea serpent. The process was so
natural to her that it seemed almost effortless, and a new way
of expressing emerged from the clays of the earth. When life brought her
back to the sea and her Mississippi home, she began
the process of creating large, public mosaic art projects
across the coast, frequently with watery themes. Often these projects
invited the public to join in the creation and participants
had the opportunity to try their hands at a new form of
art. Their
creations became a seamless part of the whole, and many were
delighted with their contributions. Often one can pass a
park or library and view a person pointing out specific places
in a mural to friends and relatives, claiming their own part
in the lovely scene.
One year the
opportunity to work with artists from around the world on a
new hotel in Barcelona,
Spain presented itself,
and Veglia found herself creating mosaics in the realm of the
Spanish masters.
Later that year, she joined artists to create a large
mural at a Brooklyn, N. Y.
school.
Along with large
public projects, Veglia put her attentions to mosaic-covered
furniture and numerous tables adorned with shore birds and
fish, once a trio of white alligators materialized from her
capable hands.
Among the works she brought to life were wall hangings
in tile and stained glass, a series of whimsical goats sailing
across the sky, which she referred to as “Magic Goats.” A series of five-foot
butterflies in Jackson, Mississippi schools, a brilliant
sunrise mosaic for the local hospital lobby, with her
granddaughters presented as the “Three Graces” at the heart of
the mural, were augmented by a memorial to fallen astronauts
at the NASA Visitors’ Center.
The Hurricane
Camille Memorial, the satellite image of that great storm
dramatically rendered in swirling blues and whites, found
itself face to face with Hurricane Katrina, which damaged the
upright part of the monument, but not the mosaic sphere. In Waveland, Mississippi, the mosaic wall
in front of City Hall remains, a corner brushed away, but the
building that it graced does not.
Veglia recently
collaborated with a Mississippi Gulf Coast architect to produce the
Hurricane Katrina Memorial on the Biloxi,
MS Town Green. The mosaic was created with glass tiles and
takes on the form of a large wave.
