Bidspirit auction | Jackson Woolley 'Portrait of a

Jackson Woolley 'Portrait of a Woman' Enamel Mosaic - Signed on the back and in the lower right.    Mosaic: 10” x 8”  Frame: 15 3/4” x 13 3/4”    Condition: The mosaic is in good condition.    Artist Bio: Jackson Woolley (1910–1992) took a degree in drama at Carnegie Tech and worked as a Shakespearean actor before turning to visual art. He and his wife Ellamarie both learned enamel in 1947 at a workshop led by the ceramist Richard Petterson at Scripps College, and became the leading figures of San Diego's mid-century enamel movement. Vitreous enamel — powdered glass fused to copper at high heat — was cheap, fast and brilliantly colored, and boomed as an American studio-craft medium from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Their early work was functional; from about 1953 they turned to wall-mounted, non-functional plaques, and Jackson experimented with segmented copper panels and layered, textured surfaces. “Enamel mosaic” is not a formal technique name but a description — a panel built from many separate small enamelled copper units mounted together to form one composition, which maps directly onto his segmented-panel work.