All About Smalti with Anabella Wewer

A graphic designer by profession, and a native of Caracas, Venezuela, Anabella is an internationally exhibited mosaic artist and passionate metalsmith. She is co-founder, and has been Creative Director of Black Box, a studio specializing in Web-based applications, since 1994. After discovering mosaics as fine art during a trip to the Vatican in 2004, she started taking mosaic classes in the United States, but quickly made the decision to train mostly in Italy. Her work is rooted in a sense of place and time, with a distinctive graphic feel that often incorporates type and her love of maps and fossils. Her passion for materials and history inform her work and push her to explore new territory grounded in time-proven rules and principles. Her background as a typographer guides her work, exploring the language of materials and technique to tell stories. "When I put hand to metal or stone, I aim to bring the viewer into a narrative, to provide questions to consider. I am intrigued by frozen moments in time; I like to imagine what came before and what follows. Place and time, their changing and their passing, and trying to capture their impermanence is my main artistic directive,” says Anabella of both her jewelry and mosaic work.

Anabella has studied Ravenna mosaic technique with Luciana Notturni, in Ravenna, Italy; stone micro-mosaic and opus vermiculatum with Arianna Gallo and Luca Barberini of Koko Mosaico in Ravenna; filati micro-mosaics with Maestro Carlo Meloni (Rome); abstract and modern mosaics with Verdiano Marzi (Ravenna/Paris), Dugald MacInnes (Scotland), Matteo Randi (Ravenna) and Dino Maccini (Piacenza) as well as with Valeria Manzo, Dagmar Friedrich and Laura Carraro at the Scuola Mosaicisti dei Friuli, Spillimbergo; and honed her skills using native materials with Rachel Sager; color in mosaics with Carol Shelkin, and got her beginnings under the guidance of Gina Hubler (Pennsylvania). Her native languages are Spanish and Portuguese, and she also speaks English and Italian. She lives in Macungie, Pennsylvania.