Many great artists have expressed themselves through the medium of mosaics, but what actually is a mosaic? For many the snap answer would be that it is simply a classical work of art, created from small blocks of coloured stone or glass, embedded in plaster or concrete and arranged en masse to create a picture or pattern in much the same way that a painter uses oils on his canvas. This is certainly true as far as it goes. What is described above is indeed a mosaic, but it is just one expression of an art form that embraces a much wider universe of applications, techniques, materials, styles and forms.

A mosaic may indeed be as permanent as an age old Roman wall decoration that has endured virtually unchanged over the centuries and can still be viewed today as bright and clear as on the day it was first laid down. But the term has also been applied to the arrangement of candies on a child's birthday cake, to ever-changing patterns within a kaleidoscope, to beds of sea shells spread over the beach and to intransigent, flickering images arranged on a computer screen. Decorated concrete columns, coloured strips of paper glued to cardboard; translucent plastic, displayed on glass; snipped up newsprint pasted onto board and a vast multitude of photographic techniques can all legitimately lay claim to the designation of "mosaic". Indeed in a broader sense even science and nature have used the term to good effect, as signifying an assembly of discrete elements to form a macroscopic whole, such as when describing the patterns of the scales on a snake's back or a layer of pebbles contained within a block of conglomerate rock.

However, we need to confine this investigation to the concept of mosaic as a form of artistic expression. From the preceding discussion, we are clearly not dealing with any explicit methodology, but with an effect or artistic style that has many forms of expression and is manifest through a host of mediums and carefully developed techniques. So what actually should this elusive term actually signify to the artist and to his viewers?

Any serious definition of the term "mosaic", in an artistic sense, has to recognise that we are not dealing with any specific art form but with the deliberate manipulation of the effect that assemblies of small discrete elements of colour and texture have on the perception of the human brain. Our eyes are wonderful instruments for sending a huge amount of information, to both our conscious and sub conscious brain, as raw data. But although received by the eye in discrete units of data, the human brain has not the time available to instantly recognise and use each elemental unit of information that is sent to it by way of the optic nerve. So what does the brain do?

It actively seeks out recognisable patterns in the incoming "data" and working on a purely macroscopic level searches for clues on meaning, by comparing and contrasting the perceived patterns with familiar images already held in the subconscious memory of the individual. The result is that a picture / image is created within our conscious mind that is perceived by us as complete and coherent as our clever brain glosses over or fills in the many gaps that are implicit in the mosaic artist's work. The true mosaic artist instinctivelly realises the importance of this mechanism within our psyche and uses clever techniques such arranging the elemental shapes or blocks to give "flow" or movement to the work and would also adopt specific forms of outlining and background layout to emphasise the importance of principal images. With a few such sleights of the hand the good artist activelly manipulates our overall perception of the work to give it life and to achieve the desired communication of the artistic concept directly into our sub consciousnes mind - often using only a very limitted palette of colours or shapes.

Thus the best definition of "mosaic art" that I can give, is that it is the intended effect that an artist achieves through placing small discrete coloured and textured shapes into an overall assembly that can easily be perceived to be a recognisable picture, image or pattern by a human viewer, when the work is viewed as a whole.