"Magnificent Mosaics"
Southern Accents, May/June 2008, by Amber Kaye Henderson

Style Setter: Sara Baldwin
This artist-turned-entrepreneur transforms Earth's beauty into intricate installations

Growing up on a rural Virginia farm, Sara Baldwin, founder of New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone, learned to appreciate the natural world. "Living between Chesapeake Bay marshes and old maritime forests in loblolly pine and American holly, between barrier islands and rustling cornfields, I always had a visual feast around me as a child - sunsets and sunrises, tropical storm skies, and millions of migrating birds," she says.

Classically trained as a painter, Baldwin began the company, whose name refers to an Italian town known for mosaics, with the idea of "creating art that is not only beautiful but also practical and functional and that resonates with who I am as a person," she says. "We create inspired woks of art that daw on the most time-honored techniques of the craft: subtle blending and balancing of stone colors and the proportionality of elements, such as background and border or subject and accents, and even the spacing of tiles," says Baldwin. The Silk Road collection, debuting this year, showcases traditional Asian designs.