Birches by Michael Sweere

Michael Sweere was born (1965) and raised in Owatonna, Minnesota. After receiving his Commercial Art degree from Mankato Technical Institute in Mankato, Minnesota, Sweere spent 4 years studying under Peter Bougie in an ateliere environment (a workshop style of training where several students study under a master). Bougie is best known as a realist painter.¹ For almost 20 years, Sweere worked as an advertising art director, where he designed product packaging. As a mosaicist, Sweere is essentially a self-taught artist who realized his favored medium and genre of art through outdated and discarded items from his advertising career. In 2005, Sweere opened the Michael Sweere Mosaic Company located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he and his wife Carole, and their 2 dogs—Ladybug and Tully—currently reside (Michael Sweere, written communication, March 23, 2012). Sweere defines art as “creating a thought-provoking image”² and notes the wry humor with his paper-based mosaics—he says, “my paper mosaics (especially the landscapes) depict trees—the natural resource from which paper packaging comes. Once a tree, still a tree.”²

Birches, another tree-themed work, is a 3-panel (2 are 30×60 inches and 1 is 48×36 inches) mosaic consisting of glass, stone, and ceramic that is enhanced with glass beads and abalone shell. The viewer is immediately attracted to the refreshing crispness of the whole scene depicted in Birches—the clarity of the blue sky, the purity of the whiteness in the tree trunks, the coolness in the temperate greens of the foliage—all convey this soothing quality. Each tile is precision cut and carefully pieced together in jigsaw puzzle fashion to unite the whole. The intermixing of the man-made ceramics and natural abalone shells and stone adds texture and mystery to the overall feeling of the piece. One gets a “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more”³ sensation when viewing Birches.

Birches is located on the 12th floor of the Gonda Building in Rochester, Minnesota.