Packed

Among all the outstanding works I saw at the Corning Museum, this was one of the most impressive. Outwardly a modest genre painting, this turns out not to be a painting at all, but a mosaic— a micromosaic, to be specific.

The picture is made up of thousands of tiny glass rods bundled together and standing on end. There are 1400 rods per square inch, all assembled by hand. (Some works had as many as 5000)

Were I condemned to make a work like this, I’d be raving mad within a day.