When a friend said he wanted a naked lady in his bathroom, Robert Hennessy didn’t take it as a joke. Instead, he went to work, installing a life-size mosaic work of art complete with three-dimensional curves.
The owner of Hennessy Floor Company in downtown Hendersonville, he is both a businessman and a self-made artist. If you want hardwood floors or carpet, no problem. That’s what he does for a living. It’s what his daddy did for a living. And he’s good at it, being a certified “Master Mechanic” of flooring. But Hennessy is also the creative type, artsy in a practical kind of way, the kind of guy who likes to renovate and artistically enhance bungalows with antiques, European imports, and original art to the nth degree. In the spirit of AirBnB, he also rents guest houses to visiting tourists. Take, for example, his Villa Roma in Hendersonville. In the bathroom is a mosaic wallcovering of a horse, made of small iridescent tiles set against a black marble background. It’s stunning at first glance, but it’s the second look — when your hand touches the glass squares — when you realize it’s not perfectly flat. Actually, it ripples, like a horse’s muscles might ripple.
“My mosaic tile work is no more than very small glass tiles formed together to make a picture or pattern,” Hennessy says. Doing mosaics for so long, he found a way to raise the base of the work surface to make the piece look 3D: “It gives it a new meaning.” He admits he worried a little about the sensually proportioned woman he sculpted in the shower. “I asked my client if it was going to be okay with his wife, and, as it turned out, she loved it. If I am making a human or animal, half the work is building up the muscle tone to look right before I apply the mosaic glass.”
Mosaics — be they simple ceramic tiles you might find in a gas-station restroom or elaborate works of art — date back to ancient history. The first mosaics were created by pushing pebbles into drying mud. It was later picked up by the Greeks and Romans and used by Christian craftsmen to tell religious stories and richly embellish the interiors of churches, peaking in the Byzantine period.
Today, mosaics cover everything from walls and floors to furniture and cellphones, using every imaginable material, including stones, glass, tiles, and cultural flotsam and jetsam (such as beer-bottle caps) durable enough to be used in street art.
Artistic mosaics are inherently labor intensive, requiring not only an eye for aesthetics but learned craftsmanship. “I started as a kid making pictures out of leftover tile from jobs working with my Dad doing flooring,” Hennessy recalls. “When I was growing up, I would rent houses and would do a tile picture somewhere in the house. When I got older, I installed tile for a living and started selling my mosaic art to customers. The horse I created in the bathroom took me 100 hours, three bottles of wine, and a little bloodshed, but it was worth it.”
On average, he completes up to six major figurative installations a year. “We also do a lot of backsplashes that are not as fancy but still tasteful,” he explains. Recently, though, Hennessy completed an artistic kitchen backsplash for an upscale home at Lake Summit. It shows a mountain range with a lake in the foreground, conifers along the far shore, and the sun rising behind the mountains. Giving this work his special touch, Hennessy included a 3-D tree that sits on the near side of the lake, jutting out just enough to be interesting but not so much to get in the way of frying a fish on the stove.
Public examples of Hennessy’s work include two mosaics on Main Street Hendersonville (at The Dugout Sports Bar & Grill and Mezzaluna Brick Oven Tap House) and a third at the nearby Pump House Fitness Center. Another major installation was a swimming-pool backsplash that consists of semi-precious stones. “Very beautiful and very expensive,” he muses. “Sometimes I will use jewelry or coins in my work. I like to call it bling.”
For more information, call 828-698-3434 or visit hennessyfloor.com.