A gifted a talented mosaic artist and California native, Tami Macala has worked as an artist for more than 15 years. Throughout her career, she has engaged to join various organizations and eventually moved to have found one herself in 2009, the Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art (SBSMA) which offers to teach of mosaic art in a creative and informative environment. Macala aims to share her knowledge and love of mosaic art with many workshops and hosts many talented artists from various parts of the world to share their expertise through the SBSMA.
Aside from having found the SBSMA, she is also the mind behind All Cracked Up Mosaics, a website that offers workshops to artists interested in the medium of Mosaic. Included in the website are her artworks which she does for Fine Art, Residential Art, and Public Art. Macala’s work revolves around bringing beauty to otherwise normal everyday places, and does both residential and public artworks. She takes inspiration from nature and the world around her, as depicted in her works of a sun, the ocean, and even animals. How she came to this point was through the realization of how much context and inspiration one can get from the environment.
For her artworks, Macala makes use of an assortment of stained glass fragments, glass fusions and even reflective glass in order to convey an image which is consistent with the theme of our gallery. Within the frames of her artworks are observable, realistic figures. She dwells more toward realism in her work, though she gives personalities and expressive faces to some shapes as shown in her work Ginni, The Swirling Sun which was given facial features and was made with a use of complementary colors such as orange against blue. Macala has shown masterful work in utilizing colors as closest to what inspired them as possible and can be observed in her work of Happy Spring Day, in which the colored glass fragments used to fill the sky resemble that closely of a real sky. In her work Over The Moon, we can observe that she made use of mirror fragments for her stars and she again, gave the Moon an expression of it sleeping to symbolize the night. Her work on heavenly bodies are seen throughout numerous art pieces, such as her Family Icon Mural where her Sun was given a face alongside with a Lion and an American and Danish Flags to symbolize the background in the family of who the mural is dedicated to. Her work Lion For Me? was made in a similar way as all her artworks, but is unique in a way that it was made with the shape of a lion and not within a square frame. Included in that artwork are sentimental pieces which mean a lot to the artist. Lastly, her public artwork PAL Mural 2010 was a community project that incorporated various stained glass colors and a centerpiece made with mirror shards. Through all the artworks by Macala in the gallery, she focuses on realism and gives humanistic elements to some shapes while being able to capture accurate colors to display images.
In summary, Macala’s artworks fit into the Mosaic Gallery because she makes use of stained glass fragments in order to form a bigger picture. The realism and simplicity in her artstyle show a different perspective to the beauty of otherwise ordinary everyday objects.