Elena Morone was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957 where she pursued a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the Escuela Nacional Manuel Belgrano graduating in 1979. After moving to Chicago in the early ’90s Elena kept painting acrylics, received a Master’s degree in Hispanic Linguistics while working as an art and Spanish teacher and raising her family. In 2014, Elena was introduced by chance to the Chicago Mosaic School, mosaic being a media she had never tried before and was hardly aware of. At the School she learned to do mosaics as an art form in the technique it was done for hundreds of years in Ravenna, Italy. Elena also took classes with master mosaic artists from Scotland, Japan, Italy, Australia, Argentina, and of course the United States.

More recently Elena added other techniques such as picassiette using broken china and other elements and formatting the base with wire cloth to make irregular shaped bases. Elena Morone had exhibited her mosaics in curated shows at the Tall Grass Art Gallery, Chicago Mosaic School, at Raw Edge Chicago, Chicago Fine Art Salon and at the Shine Bright Studio. Her work is in collections in the United States, Italy, and Argentina.

Elena rarely works with grouting to back her pieces, preferring the satisfying method of pressing tesserae into the mortar. A tessera is an uneven tile cut by hand with a hammer and chisel or tile nippers. It could be made of stone, glass, or ceramics. Most of all, she enjoys the pattern called andamento where the tesserae flow like rivers along the mortar. Andare in Italian means “to move on a path” or “to go.” It refers to the way the tesserae “walk” or flow in curves along the mortar, drawing the viewer’s eye along with them.

In his poem “Caminante No Hay Camino” the Spanish poet Antonio Machado has written beautifully about “walking” the path and life.

...

Al andar se hace camino,

y al volver la vista atrás

se ve la senda que nunca

se ha de volver a pisar.

Caminante no hay camino

sino estelas en la mar.

...

By walking you leave a trail,

and turning, you look back

at a path you will never tread again.

Wanderer, there is no path,

only wakes in the sea.