Full Circle

Lately, I've been thinking about circles... Maybe the influence is the beautiful full moon tonight?

On my phone, I have the simplest, zen-like game. Basically, you just try to draw a perfect circle with your finger. After each attempt, the game gives you a score. Drawing a perfect circle is much harder than it seems and takes patience and concentration.

Sara Baldwin designs the most gorgeous glass mosaics. This pattern is from New Ravenna for Ann Sacks

Today, in a moment of tedium, I was able to find a peaceful place by drawing a few circles with a pencil, ultimately connecting them. Naturally, I began to think of circle tiles that I especially like.

This nineteenth-century drawing depicts the mosaic floors as they existed in St. Denis cathedral in the twelfth-century. The interlocking circle pattern on the right is from the Chapelle de la Vierge.

From the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle

Speaking of historical tile, this majolica design comes from the late fifteenth-century della Robbia workshop, and is from the Loggias of Raphael in the Vatican. The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI most likely imported the taste for Moorish patterns from Spain.

Of course, I'm not completely obsessed with history. There are some cool contemporary tile artists making circle tiles too.

Here's a groovy one by another one of my tile friends, Mary Anderson of Bon Ton Tile in Minnesota:

Disqueo

And finally, one last tile, also by Mary Anderson:

And that brings us... 

you know---