Spotlight on Melrose Artist: Roberta Tobey Gertz
Written and Photographed by Ellen Putnam
Ahead of the Melrose Open Studio Tour next weekend, we spoke with Melrose mosaic artist Roberta Tobey Gertz about her work, which will be on display in her home studio during the event.
Gertz began doing mosaic work over 30 years ago after she took a class on the art form. After a few early pieces in stained glass, Gertz soon settled into her favorite medium: bits of broken pottery and dishes that she reassembles into amazingly lifelike works, often of birds, insects, and other scenes from nature.
Some of her most striking pieces include a snowy owl skimming the surface of water, tiny pearls representing droplets of water; a lamb peeking around a barn door; a portrait of her husband that, although it uses abstract colors and shapes, perfectly captures his expression.
While mosaic work is not as widely practiced as painting, ink drawing, or pottery, Gertz is part of a larger community of mosaic artists in the region, and she has participated in art exchanges and shows with other mosaic artists.
Gertz is also a familiar figure on the Melrose art scene - she often participates in the annual Melrose Arts Festival, and her husband, Bruce, is known to many Melrosians as a jazz bassist. (They both organize the annual Keeping Jazz Alive concert, and his quartet performed this past weekend at The Food Drive’s annual Harvest fundraiser.)
Gertz often starts from a photograph - her own, a friend’s, or even one she finds browsing the web - and uses it as the basis of her work. She sketches out the design she plans to use, and then starts assembling the design, attaching shards of ceramic with cement and filling in the gaps with different colors of grout that complement the design. In some pieces, the gaps between the ceramic pieces are narrow; in others, they are large, and the grout between the pieces becomes part of the art.
The shelves of her studio are filled with stacks of chipped plates and cups, and with boxes of shards of ceramics and other materials, color-coded so she can easily incorporate them into her latest works.
“People ask me if I could use this chipped dish or this broken cup,” she said, “but I have so many at this point, I’ll only take it if it’s an especially interesting texture or pattern.”
For the Open Studio Tour, Gertz will be welcoming visitors to see her studio and to walk around the first floor of her home and spot all of the mosaics she has put up on the walls and even incorporated into the house and landscape design itself.
Take a look through our photos of Gertz’s studio and some of her work, and make sure to stop by and see it all in person this weekend at the Melrose Open Studio Tour (Saturday, November 15th and Sunday, November 16th between 11am and 4pm)!
