A museum that rocks
Kim Mosier runs the Rare Rock Mosaic Art Museum, where he displays the frames pictures he creates from the rocks and minerals he collects from around the world, cuts, shapes and polishes for his display.
Mark Aronoff/PDPublished: Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 1:32 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 1:32 p.m.
When the creative urge strikes Kim Mosier, he saws rock.
It's difficult and it's dirty the way the 74-year-old Santa Rosan produces framed pictures made entirely of the rock, minerals and semi-precious stones that he cuts into shapes — animals, still-life objects, landscape features, human portraits and figures — with circular and band saws.
His artistic satisfaction derives in part from using natural materials eons old to make flat mosaics and high-relief pictures that will last forever, or at least until the glues holding the pieces of stone let go.
“What I really like about this is that nobody else does it,” said Mosier, a semi-retired land developer and financier.
As as far as he knows, no one else is making hang-them-on-the-wall pictures from sawed rock.
Whether or not his art form is unique, it's fairly certain there's not another soul on this rocky planet who owns and operates a museum filled with pictures made of stone.
Set among the car-repair shops and warehouses on Coffey Lane between West Steele Lane and Piner Road, Mosier's “Rare Rock Mosaic Art Museum” is a tucked-away gem.
The artist charges no admission and he keeps his small, attractive museum (mosierart.com) open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 4 p.m.
All of the 60-some pieces on exhibit were made by Mosier during the two far-separated eras of his life that preceded and followed his demanding career as a residential and commercial developer in Sacramento.
The Marysville native and Cal grad has been interested in rock and gemstones for about as far back as he can remember. There was a time, in fact, that he planned to work as a geologist.
He traces his flinty avocation to the moment in 1959 that he and his wife, Joanne, were strolling past a furniture store in Sacramento and she remarked on the interesting nature of a tile mosaic of a cat.
“I told her I could make that myself, out of rock,” he recalled.
His first piece, at age 24, was a cat he made of tile-size pieces of rock that he'd cut with a used, 24-inch diamond saw he'd bought.
The young Mosier bought interesting, colorful rocks and made several more mosaics. Then his career geared up — he was assistant engineer of Sacramento's water and sewer department before becoming a developer of apartment houses, upscale mobile-home parks and fast-food restaurants.
He walked away from his rocks and saws and didn't return to them for nearly 40 years. By 2001 he was mostly retired, he had some money for buying high-tech saws and a gorgeous selection of rocks and gems — and he had four decades of ideas piled up his mind.
In the past decade, Mosier has created dozens of pieces in the three-car garage at his home near Spring Lake Park. Just six years ago he advanced from flat mosaics and began experimenting with making three-dimensional animals and other objects that stand out from the pictures' background and are attached to the background with adhesives.
In the heaviest of his pictures — it weighs 60 pounds — a polar bear of calcite emerges from a background of snowy dolomite. In another, a sea of pale blue calcite glistens behind a British Navy sailing ship made of marble and rhyolite and armed with obsidian cannon.
Mosier's rocks and gems came from shops, shows and Web sites around the world, although California is the origin of most.
Which are toughest and easiest to work with?
“Onyx, that's the easiest,” Mosier said. “It's just soft enough.”
“I don't like working with Mexican agate. It's harder than hell. Turquoise is extraordinarily expensive and hard to work with. Some jasper is prone to chipping.”
Mosier uses diamond-blade circular saws to cut rock into thin slabs or slices, then a band saw to transform a slab into an art element: the head of a dinosaur, the San Francisco skyline's Transamerica Pyramid, a full moon, a flash of color in a butterfly's wing. He coats all of his pieces with epoxy to bring out vibrancy of the colors, but he uses no paint.
He exhibited his creations at home for several years, sometimes inviting groups and individuals in to see them. With the house filling up, he decided in 2004 to open a small museum.
Although the typical artist shows his or her works hoping people will buy them, Mosier's rock pictures aren't for sale. His free-admission museum isn't about making money, he said.
He simply loves his unusual and earthy artworks and he enjoys reading remarks in his guest book from people who say they like them, too.
“If I sold them, I wouldn't have them,” he said. “And I probably wouldn't have the museum as a result.”
You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.
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