Meet Anne Ziemienski, Glen Ellen mosaic master

The mighty face of Jupiter greets visitors to the villa of Joshua Rymer and Timothy Frazer.

With his barrel chest and aquiline nose, the imposing god is permanently embedded in a mosaic that appears as venerable as anything you might see in a floor in Rome or the ruins of Pompeii.

But in truth, this ancient-looking piece, just outside Rymer and Frazer’s front door, has weathered only 10 summers and winters in the Valley of the Moon.

It is the work of Anne Ziemienski, a rare artist practicing the all-but-lost art of Old World mosaics. She arranges tiny, hand-cut pieces of marble into striking designs, many featuring Greco-Roman mythological characters that make their way into panels, floors, fountains and even backsplashes.

The Glen Ellen artist also creates artistic garden pathways of mosaics made with pebbles so smooth you can walk on them with your bare feet, although they’re so exquisite it almost feels like a sin to step on them.

“The give wonderful great curiosity to the building. People come and they’re welcomed by this water-based, Poseidon-type creature, almost as if it’s a pool at the front of the house,” said Rymer, who also commissioned Ziemienski to create a hanging mosaic for a garden wall as well as a free-standing piece that rests against the outside of the Italian-style house, itself designed by Anne’s well-known artist husband, Dennis Ziemienski.

“This is meticulously detailed work. You can’t hire an unskilled person to just come and do this,” he added. “She places every single one of these tiles and they take weeks to do. They’re utterly unique and represent an amazing passion for Anne. They’re just spectacular.”

Ziemienski was inspired to her unique functional art by her years living in Italy and the Middle East. It is rooted in her teen-age years, when her adventurous mother suddenly decided to rent out the family house in Orinda and take her kids to Rome for some serious culture.

Ziemienski was 16 and none too pleased. It was 1969 and Berkeley was a happening scene. It took her only a few weeks to fall for The City of Love and everything in it.

“That’s when my whole life changed, living in Rome. My mother was an amazing woman,” the artist said, seated at a table in the kitchen of her Italianesque home, designed by Dennis. “He had a real sense of beauty and buildings. She moved us down to the old part of Rome while all the American expats where living in highrises downtown.”

Her school bus stop was across from The Forum at the Piazza del Campidoglio, one of Rome’s most beautiful squares, designed in the 16th century by Michelangelo.

She spent a year in Rome and then returned with her mother after she graduated from high school. By that time she was into sculpture and ceramics.

“There is something about the idea of 2,000 years ago that really implanted on me and it has has always been a part of time I’m fascinated with,” she said.

But her career path took several side roads before she wound up as a full-time artist. In her 20s, she got her degree in nursing and worked in the post-ICU unit in a San Francisco hospital at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

“They didn’t have a name for it. I just knew I had a whole floor full of beautiful men in isolation units. It was horrible,” she remembered.

When a girlfriend got her to take up belly dancing for fun Zieminski, mesmerized by Middle Eastern music, dropped her mainstream career to join a band, winding up in London, Paris and Cairo as a professional belly dancer. The art of the ancient world continued to compel her and it was there, while spending time in the ruins of Carthage, that she “went crazy” for mosaics and the stories they told.

“I really got a sense of how valuable and important they were in life,” she said. “And they kept houses cool. You could throw water down on them and the floor would stay cold. They’re wonderful.”

After a few years she returned home and worked with her brother in a clothing design business in Petaluma. It was her husband, Dennis Ziemienski, a successful illustrator of everything from Super Bowl posters to book covers, and now a respected and successful painter, who encouraged her to take up mosaics, even though it meant figuring out the process herself.

“When you‘re reading ancient texts and they’re talking about lava dust and things from Mt. Vesuvius that you can mix in... well, it just doesn’t help much,” she said with a chuckle.

Through trial and error she created a system. For the mosaics, she buys slabs of different colored marble, a preferred material in ancient Rome, and cuts them into long strips with a diamond saw. Dennis custom-designed a wooden machine that will bite the strips into small chips.

A friend asked her to do one like the “Fayum” faces found on some Egyptian mummies. Suddenly, people started seeing her work and she was in business -- and perpetually busy.

For the pathways, she uses Mexican river rock, naturally tumbled.

“I buy them by the ton and pick through them,” she said, a laborious process she enjoys. It means meticulously sifting through dozens and dozens to find just the right stone for each piece of the design. She makes them in panels in her home studio, placing each piece in a form with sand. She then pours liquid grout and lets it dry.

“The rocks need to line up. The direction I lay them in is what makes the energy in the painting,” she said. “If I put them in randomly, they wouldn’t tell any kind of story. They wouldn’t have any strength or image.”

Ziemineski’s work is in private homes and gardens all over the country, including pieces popular in the Southwest inspired by Navajo blankets. She’s done Kachina dolls, a bathroom in West Marin with “Wyrm,” the Inverness monster, and an angel for her mother’s grave in Sonoma.

An eight-foot-long image of Persephone graces the floor of the entrance to her own Italian-style Glen Ellen home, which Dennis designed.

Ziemmienski has resisted any commissions she can’t do herself, spurning suggestions that she act only as a designer while a team of installers puts them together.

That would take most of the pleasure out of it.

“It’s a big geometric puzzle,” she said. “I just love the process. It’s very, very meditative to me. I get to be out here in my little funky studio, and i have music playing and the Giant’s game going and I just work away.”

You can reach staff writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.