A Colorful Addition to the Falmouth Bike Path

Sometimes all you need is a little patience. Just ask Jim Bowen. This past Thursday at , Bowen presented a talk and film chronicling the long and arduous process of creating the Shining Sea Bike Path mural.

The documentary—included as part of the 2011 —was produced and filmed by .

A mosaic is a very detailed work of art made up of numerous pieces of small material (usually glass or stone) that fit together to make one large picture.

For Bowen, a West Falmouth native and art teacher at Cape Cod Community College, this particular mosaic proved to be a major undertaking: it took four months, 800 hours, and 19,634 individual pieces to complete.

The mural, located on the Shining Sea Bike Path under the Palmer Avenue overpass, is an enormous 20 x 4 ft. piece of art that shows a number of Falmouth landmarks, including the Nobska Lighthouse.

Bowen and his team of artists worked feverishly on the mosaic over the course of one winter in the space that used to be Ghelfi’s Candy Shop downtown.

“I often work in solitude, alone in the studio," Bowen says in the film. “But working as a group really was very fulfilling. We developed a real fellowship.” 

Indeed, the Shining Sea Bike Path mural proved to be a major team effort. Using what is commonly known as the “double direct method,” which allows the artist to trace the mosaic over a drawing of it (usually referred to as a “cartoon” by mosaic artists) directly onto fiberglass mesh. They then cut the finished project up into separate pieces in order to transport it to its intended location before reassembling it.

Patti Johnson, founder of Friends of Falmouth Bikeways, a non-profit membership organization that helped fund the mural, along with , was there for the process and says she is looking forward to funding similar projects in the future.

“[The mosaic] will be a very unique and beautiful asset,” Johnson says in the film. “We’re trying to put other art projects on the bike path, and this is the first.”

Bowen’s pride in the mosaic is evident as well.

“A mosaic is everlasting”, he explains. “They never lose their color or their consistency. This will be up for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

Bowen is already at work on his next project, a mural for the recently opened .