About Us
Mosaicatlas.com was designed by the mosaic artist Bill Buckingham who died in 2010. It is based on an initial concept by John O'Brien who has now taken ownership of the site and will look after it going forward.
I first met Bill at the annual SAMA Conference in Washington DC in March 2005. We shared several long coach trips as we toured the many public mosaic sites in DC. During one of these trips I explained an idea I had for a web site where people all over the world could add information about public mosaics they had seen and liked. This would allow any mosaic fan visiting a strange place to check out in advance whether there were some mosaics worth visiting. In effect it would be a worldwide equivalent to the tours SAMA organises at each of their Conference venues. My problem was that I did not know how to write the web code to create the site and link it to a real map of the world.
Bill did know how to write the code and picked up the idea and made it happen. He did away with the part about linking to a real map of the world and adopted a much more straightforward solution of grouping mosaics by town or city, within state or region, within country.
Bill and his partner, Michael Welch, were co-founders of Mosaic Rocks!, an online store specializing in natural stone tesserae for mosaic artists, and publishers of the Mosaic Yearbook Project , and the Mosaic Art Now magazine.
When Bill became seriously ill in 2009 the Atlas was put in "mothballs" where it remained until 2012. Then with the technical help of Allan Punton, we unravelled and analysed the programming code for the site. All of the images and the database have been moved to a new server, and the 'Contribute a photo' facility brought back online.
I hope you will spread the word about the Atlas to your mosaic loving friends and encourage them to contribute some of their favourite public mosaics.
Please feel free to email me - John O'Brien - with your comments, feedback, or questions.
jfpobrien @ blueyonder.co.uk
(When you copy the email address, do not put spaces before and after the @)