Indoors or out, wherever Clare Dohna sees a bare space, she dreams up a mosaic design to embellish it. A tile-and-stone "tapestry" brightens the wall behind her woodstove. Squares
of green-, gold-, and red-patterned tiles frame the hall mirror. In the landscape, multihued mosaics form steppingstones, cover concrete orbs, and dance along the back of a 50-foot garden snake that weaves through the perennial border.
Mosaics add personal — and colorful — details to your surroundings, says the Vashon Island–based artist, who now teaches workshops at Dig Floral & Garden, a local nursery. "Tiles and mosaics have lasted for centuries," she says. "Those ancient Roman mosaics are still being walked on today."
Trained as a sculptor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Dohna has worked in clay for 30 years. For two decades she created and sold ceramic pins from her stand at Pike Place Market, delighting customers with tiny pictures molded in clay. While creating mosaics for her own interiors and garden, Dohna discovered she loved the varied art form. Through her studio, Firehouse Tileworks, she makes one-of-a-kind mosaic garden art and custom tile for interiors and exteriors. Dohna hand-cuts and fires each tile, using dozens of shapes to form her intricate designs. Working in the basement studio of the 1909 firehouse she and husband Eric Weber have remodeled for their home, Dohna rolls out the clay and cuts it into flora- and fauna-inspired pieces: bugs, bees, butterflies, flower petals, and leaves.
She fires, glazes with a riot of hues, and fires again — and then magically transforms these "pieces of gold," as Dohna calls them, into dazzling mosaic patterns.
"I'm definitely a person who attends to all the details," the artist-instructor says, likening her mosaic saucers, tiles, balls, and birdhouses to scenes from nature. "I like it when you see the piece as a whole from a distance and then, as you get closer, you notice the details," she continues. It's like being attracted to a field of flowers and then coming closer and closer, until you look inside one flower and see its stamen in the center."
Mosaic tips
Clare Dohna sees the potential for covering any surface with mosaic patterns. "I go into other people's houses and think, Oh, I really want to mosaic this place," she says, chuckling. Mosaics can add a small accent or make a major design statement. Here are a few pointers.
• Limit the palette
"Start with a color you love and then add various shades of it, or its complement, which is its opposite on the color wheel," Dohna explains.
• Use your collections Stones or shells gathered while on vacation, bits of beach glass, or shards of pottery are ideal "pieces" for your mosaic design. You can add small colored tiles, found at hardware stores. Dohna also uses smooth pebbles to add texture and pattern to her designs.
• Adorn the unexpected
Add a mosaic in an unusual spot, Dohna suggests. "You can put tiles on the stair risers — that's a nice surprise because you don't see them going down, but when you go up, they appear."
• Keep it simple
"Adding tiles doesn't have to cost a fortune," Dohna says. "Surround a handmade tile with solid-colored field tiles from a home improvement center." Or try another of her favorite techniques and install a mosaic "rug" into the floor. "You can set a tile rug into a bathroom floor, which makes for a nice accent piece."
Info: Clare Dohna, Firehouse Tileworks, Vashon Island (206/463-5427). Custom tiles begin at $40 for a 6-inch tile. Her two-day classes (next session Jul 21–22; $125, including materials; 206/463-5096) introduce basic design and techniques for working with tile and grout. Students design and make their choice of a mosaic pattern for a terra-cotta saucer, concrete steppingstone, or mirror frame suitable for the home or garden. Go to www.dignursery.com for more information.
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