MOSAIC OF ART - Episode 35; Feb. 20, 2011

Art History department chair at the University of Mary Washington, JEAN ANN DABB is an enthusiast of mosaics - past and present. But her sense of the medium is evolving. "If my working definition now includes a composition of separate distinct elements which having been combined into a larger matrix, then I've given up the notion of some kind of adhesive element and permanence and stability, so I think it's whatever the artist may want to use as their defining definition..." AMY KUPFERBERG began as a metal sculptor. "While fabricating an armature for another sculpture, I became intoxicated by the beauty and grace created from arc welding. In order to fabricate the armature to an exact likeness, I bent the steel and clamped it down directly on top of a drawing of the armature and welded the steel at the cross points. When I lifted the armature up and saw the marks that were left on the paper, I knew that something important had happened." A.K. LISA SILVERA and CHERYL MOODY help Amy - as well as many other artists - find the appreciative audience of collectors and institutions that provide the "air" in which AMY can take flight. "So we do PR, branding and marketing for the contemporary artists whose work we're passionate about." DINORAH DE JESUS RAMIREZ creates animation the old fashioned way: marking on film, frame by frame. "When you hold a film in your hand it has a head and a tail. I can look at this (strip of film) and see movement in the same way that a composer can look at a sheet of music and hear notes - a symphony. ." D.R. After 30 years behind the camera and cultivating his market, PAUL MORRIS has the commercial side down: the corporate portrait, the romantic backlit smoke coming off a cigar, the money shot of golden light on a downtown high-rise, but his heart is in the landscape aesthetic of his early 20th-century heroes, captured on film - not digitally. Stone sentinels in a remote Scottish meadow. He'll talk about it all.