Mutsumi Olson

Artist Statement

I attended an art university in Japan. My focus was oil painting, but I also learned other mediums and techniques. I took education courses for teaching art as well. After graduation, I taught junior high and high shool art classes. In the curriculum was a section on egg mosaics where the students painted eggshells and broke them into soybean-size pieces. They used these pieces to create mosaic pictures.
Personally, I focused my art on acrylic painting, mostly abstract. After a couple of gallery shows in Tokyo, I added some small acrylic-painted eggshell pieces to accent my work.
Later, I moved to the United States where I did some painting until our daughter was born. I then became a full-time, stay-at-home mom until our daughter was in high school. As she became more independent, I was able to begin focusing on my art again.
I painted animals and farm scenes on whole eggs that had the yolks and whites blown out through tiny holes. I was also doing some water
color and acrylic painting, as well as sketching the local scenery and my dog. I decided to accent my sketches with acrylic-painted eggshells, which led to more and more of the piece being done with eggshell mosaic. To get more detail using this technique I broke the eggshells into tinier pieces, about 1 millimeter by 2 millimeters. This is why I call it Eggshell Micro Mosaics.