Photos by Rimas Zailskas
Long ago, on an island far, far away, Victor Nunnally’s already adventurous life took a new turn. He was working at a resort in the Virgin Islands when the resort’s art director asked him to make an entry sign for an art studio that had been constructed as a recreational activity for visitors. “I was already known for oil painting and black-and-white drawings,” Victor says, “so I was asked to create a mosaic and a painted bottom for the sign.”
Unconcerned by the fact that he’d never worked in tile or glass before, Victor plunged in and produced a sign incorporating a sea-world theme, which he now considers “sloppy.” But he thoroughly enjoyed the possibilities of this newly discovered art form. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that Victor now works almost exclusively in the form, using old window frames, tabletops, dinner plates, even shower doors as settings for what he calls “stories told in glass and set in stone,” many of which are on display at the small studio he opened this spring at Hendersonville’s Needful Things antique emporium.
The Caribbean, with its florid colors and drenching sunlight, attracted Victor from an early age, an attraction that grew even stronger as his graduation from high school in Burke County, North Carolina, drew near. “I developed this strong desire to exist in a tropical paradise, to live freely. I didn’t want what was being offered by consumerism,” Victor explains. Saving his earnings from a series of dreary jobs washing dishes and waiting tables, he was on a plane for the Virgin Islands two weeks after graduating, and found a job at Maho Bay Camps, a 14-acre eco-village resort.
Before returning to North Carolina years later, Victor studied filmmaking at San Francisco State University while setting up his own studio in Sonoma County, also rich in intense color and ocean light. “I’ve lived a life that took advantage of the freedom America offers most individuals,” Victor says, “pursuing the curiosities of existence and the many possibilities of life. Kind of like a mosaic.” Acting and film studies during his college years strengthened his attachment to narrative art, evident in the panels of his mosaics. “There is movement and character and a philosophy of existence,” Victor says of his work.
Color is so central to the work that it’s generally all Victor needs for inspiration. “My mosaics start by selecting a color of glass, and I go from there, creating from my head,” he says.
During a recent visit to his studio, I found Victor contemplating a jagged piece of deep scarlet glass that gleamed among a recent haul of shards he’d collected from a supplier. The same color dominates one of Victor’s most recent works, St. John Gypsy, a depiction of a Caribbean dancer whose dress glows blood red when lit from behind, arms raised and hair flying, surrounded by an azure sea comprised of tiny squares of blue glass, all fitted into the frame of a cabinet door. Blue flows through Duck Pond, the glistening bird crafted from a dozen oddly-shaped pieces of glass in green, gray, black and orange and leaving a delicate trail of bubbles formed from bead-like glass pebbles. The water flows through the lattice of the window frame that encloses it, and it takes only a little imagination to see the sunflowers in the lower portion gently waving in a summer breeze.
It can take Victor up to 30 hours to complete one mosaic, first laying out the design, then fixing each piece of glass in place with a waterproof adhesive, and finally grouting and cleaning the whole assembly. “I get very excited once I start cleaning the grout, kind of like excavating, as underneath all that dirty gunk lies a story of color and expression,” he says.
His mosaics range in size from the small eight-inch plates Victor calls Suncatchers to the shower doors as large as four-by-six feet. “Old antique windows have captured my attention, as they’re easily portable and possess the charm of the Old South,” Victor says.
One of Victor’s mosaic tabletops was recently donated to the Western North Carolina Nature Center, and taking private commissions is a new avenue Victor intends to explore. “Mosaics bring out the life of any room, garden, home or business,” he says. Victor’s enthusiasm for mosaics is now reaching out to a wider audience with a special online site for mosaic artists who have contributed over a thousand examples of their work for an art book Victor hopes to produce.
But in keeping with the exploratory orientation of his artistic life, Victor doesn’t confine himself to mosaics. He’s produced some dramatically lit photographs of Biltmore’s landscape, and dabbles in oil painting. “I thoroughly enjoy oils, but it’s still developing,” he says. “I want to understand better about that single stroke that brings the image to life. How did Renoir know to put that hue or dab of white in that one corner or blade of grass?” There’s even a screenplay in the pipeline, which Victor describes as a ghost story set in the Caribbean. All these endeavors are parts of Victor’s overall approach to making art, grounded in his everyday experience. “Life is art,” Victor says, “and the greatest medium to create on.”
Nunnally Mosaics (415-728-3111) is located within the antiques emporium Needful Things at 10 Francis Street in Hendersonville. Visit Victor’s Flickr site, with photographs of his and other mosaic artists’ work, at www.flickr.com/groups/coffeetablebook.
