The following 2-page article appeared on the cover of the Life & Times section of the Orlando Sentinel.

Pieces of art

By Nancy Imperiale
Sentinel Staff Writer

April 10, 2002

God ordered Noah to build the ark. He commanded Moses to part the Red Sea. He told Zoe to break tile.

It was in a dream in 1993 that Zoe Terlizzese received the divine marching orders to gather shattered bits and glue them to things.

Zoe woke up and told her husband, Steve. And he said, "Cool!"

So that's how the couple came to abandon lives as an office manager (Zoe) and a wall painter (Steve) to devote themselves to a dream. With no formal art training. With no five-year plan. Without even the knowledge that what they wanted to do had a name: collage mosaics.

At first they just glued new surfaces to their kitchen and bathrooms. Then they expanded, to pots and bowls and wall pockets, before discovering mirror frames and grandfather clocks. They scoured flea markets and garage sales for things to glue -- vases, shot glasses, drawer pulls, tourist trinkets, ashtrays.

Soon their artistic ambitions could not be contained in mere pretty patterns. They wanted to spread their joy like grout for a broken world, to communicate Look at us! We're living our dream! You can live yours too!

So they took tiles from games such as Scrabble and Boggle, even pried the letters off computer keyboards, and glued messages on their mosaics, like Love Will Find a Way and Just Feel the Love and Oochie Goochie Love Smoochies.

They now exhibit at art festivals as the Creative Union. Their fans include celebrities and little children. People pay thousands for the fruits of their smashing and gluing. They have won awards and are featured in art galleries across the country.

There's just one missing piece.

It's not whether Zoe feels unseemly about being a wild bohemian artist and a grandmother. It's not Steve wondering whether he should have been a rocket scientist or a judge like his brothers. It's not the obvious fears that no one will buy their art and they'll starve, or that their 43-year-old trailer will start shooting flames out of the electrical outlets again.

It's this: They tend to run out of L's.

Looming on the Lake/Marion county line is a dusty dot on the map called Ocklawaha, where the most famous thing to ever happen was an FBI shootout with the outlaw Ma Barker gang in 1935. Calling Ocklawaha rural is like saying breathing is useful. It's a place where you could make an honest living selling "Beware of Dog" signs. What it lacks in shopping malls it also lacks in cell phone service.

But it's a great place to make a mess with grout. Steve and Zoe Terlizzese (ter-LEE-zee) moved from West Palm Beach into an ancient trailer. You know you're getting close to it when your car bottoms out on a washboard road and you spot signs that say "go away" in every possible permutation. Some of Steve and Zoe's neighbors don't hanker for company.

In the spirit of community solidarity, they put up their own sign: Steve and Zoe's Plate Breakin' Acres -- We Welcome Friends and Shoot Trespassers. The message is on an oil drum painted candied-apple red with cheery china glued to it. It's as scary as a poodle.

But you would have to be meaner than Ma Barker to be shot by Steve and Zoe, who are so peace-loving they won't even smash plates. They snip every shard for their mosaics with a tile nipper, careful to preserve a repeating geometric pattern, or the stem of a painted-on daisy, or the leg on a china dog.

Their fans -- including the dozen galleries nationwide that stock their work and the art show judges who've awarded them three best of show awards -- say this attention to nonviolent nipping is what sets Steve and Zoe's work apart.

"They just put good vibes into everything," says comedian Elayne Boosler, who has a Who Are You Really? mirror and another with little handles that says Get a Grip. "You can't have any of this stuff in your house and not wake up in a good mood. It's so good I wish it was edible."

Lucky for Steve and Zoe they had an old trailer they could move into when they decided to pursue art for a living. Although they have an audience, they still have to economize. The old hunting lodge that used to belong to Steve's family was the perfect solution.

Well, not perfect.

"This place was a dungeon held together by Band-Aids. Most people said we should just bulldoze it," says Steve, 39, who has a scrubby beard and a seemingly endless collection of tie-dyed T-shirts.

Steve is handy, though. He has made many improvements.

Zoe calls Steve "Renaissance Man" and marvels at his manifold talents -- he can write poetry, he can hang drywall, he plays music, he roofs. Last year he won the coveted Thursday Night Karaoke Championship at Gator Joe's Restaurant & Lounge in downtown Ocklawaha.

Zoe, 50, has strawberry-blond hair pulled back hastily and dangling amber earrings. She wears a nondescript baggy T and black capris.

Steve likes that Zoe looks cute in flannel pajamas, and that everyone always stops her to ask for directions. He used to call Zoe the Queen of Color for her skill at tinting grout, but recently he gave her a promotion to Grand Empress of Color.

They have been married 17 years. They still say gushy things about one another.

Leaving messages behind has become a way of life. Even their refrigerator says Snif Yum Eat Chomp, spelled out with magnets.

Their most relevant messages are on their mirrors. There's the Things To Do Today mirror, which advises people to Read, Dream, Play, Laugh and more. There's the Who Will I Be Today? model, which gives the onlooker (inlooker?) a series of positive and negative choices such as Happy or Grumpy and Humble or Proud.

The artists work in a trailer lined with jalousied windows that crank open to let the cool forest breeze whistle through. After so many years they work quietly and with the regimented speed of an art assembly line. Do they ever wake up at 3 a.m. filled with the need to spontaneously create art?

"Not so much anymore," Zoe says wearily.

Corey, their apprentice, who has a sweet smile and 87 tattoos, including what looks like a gruesome snake fight, lines the bare wooden frames with colored pool tiles. He can also glue messages on.

Steve or Zoe will fill in the empty spaces with a kaleidoscope of objects collected at tag sales nationwide. An entire treasure room in the back of the dusty art trailer has shelves sagging with objects that range from the sublime (porcelain flowers, pricey china plates, cut crystal vases) to the silly (an FBI coaster, a souvenir plate celebrating the Indiana Toll Road, the back end of a headless gold cherub).

After the patterns are glued, Zoe whips up grout in an old Light n' Lively tub, beating it until it looks like batter, then icing, then peanut butter. She works the grout into the crevices with her gloved hands, patting and smoothing the sticky mixture like she's massaging a cat. When that's done Steve springs into action. He dips a yellow sponge into an old sheetrock bucket full of water, whapping the grout around and around in circles, wiping and re-wetting the sponge and buffing some more.

"This is anything but dainty," he says, in black gloves like a lobsterman.

They like to do this outside. Grout goes everywhere during mosaic, and when it dries it covers everything with dust, as if a vacuum cleaner had exploded.

Lodging, food, a Web site and some crowns from the dentist -- all items obtained with bartered mosaic art. They will even trade a piece of art for a place to stay at an out-of-town show.

Steve and Zoe enjoy a nomadic existence, living in the trailer during the winter to appear at Florida art shows, then renting a place in New York for summer to work the northern shows. They make the drive in a 1984 Chevy van with 250,000 miles.

Starving artist is just the latest in a long list of occupations. Their resumés are like their mosaics -- a union of the unrelated but ultimately enlightening.

Zoe has worked as a weather girl for the NBC affiliate in Laredo, Texas, and as a department store model, hairstylist, secretary, newspaper typesetter, waitress and jewelry maker. She once ran a State Farm insurance office, sold cars, owned a Christian bookstore, and sold popcorn at the movies.

Steve, who studied pre-law and was student government president at Palm Beach Community College, has delivered furniture, worked in restaurants, managed condos, painted houses, been a faux finish painter and worked in a frame shop.

Lately Zoe worries whether it's wise to make one's living off mosaics. God, after all, wasn't clear on the whole "sole-occupation" command.

"After the Sept. 11 attacks I was thinking, 'Are people going to buy artwork now?' I told Steve, we need to check into alternative ways of making money. Maybe we can be long-distance truck drivers. Wouldn't that be cool?"

Lord only knows why every Tom, Dick and Cheapskate who took a Home Depot tile-laying class thinks he can slap together a collage mosaic. Don't buy that, he'll whisper to his wife. I'll make you one.

Maybe everyone figures they mastered cutting and pasting in kindergarten. Maybe mosaics look too accessible to be "real" art. Maybe it's just a fun excuse to smash something.

Whatever the reason, it drives Steve and Zoe's friends nuts.

"My God, these people come in and say, 'Oh, I'm going to go home and do that!' and you just want to yell, 'Yeah? Go ahead and try it, lady!'," says Lisa Fiocca, owner of the Upstairs Gift Gallery in Hudson, Ohio, which has been selling Steve and Zoe pieces for years.

Fellow artists often flock to Steve and Zoe's tent.

"Their art is phenomenal," says silk painter Patti Spence of Clearwater. "It's like no other mosaics. It just screams spirituality. I think everybody should have a mirror that says Who Will I Be Today?"

Whatever town they're in, Steve and Zoe will scour garage sales or flea markets for materials. Knoxville and Milwaukee are both good places to look, for some reason. They got the world's ugliest dog at a flea market. His name is Einstein and he's the color of cooked liver, with a rubbery hairless body and a shock of white fuzz on his tiny head. His owner had cancer and couldn't keep him.

Steve and Zoe do a parlor trick with the used dog. They call him ugly and he snarls like a madman. Then they tell him he's beautiful and he calms down.

The dog loves the attention. His imperfection has become his exaltation. It's kind of like taking a cracked plate and giving it a place of honor above life's buffet table.

Looking at people at art shows cracks Steve up.

He loves the yuppies "power-shopping for something to match the drapes." He loves the older folks just enjoying the sunshine. He absolutely adores the little kids.

If only children could have steady employment.

"We wish kids had the money," says Steve.

"Oh, yeah," breathes Zoe.

At art shows kids can't resist the blue sign that says "Come and See The Beautiful Mosaics." They run around making faces in the mirrors. Their parents have to holler for them to "Come on!" They leave walking backward, savoring the last shiny eyefuls.

While they sell plenty of crosses and Stars of David ($45), heart wall pockets ($50), and mosaic mirrors ($225 to $700), the quickest path to a profitable show is to unload a few grandfather clocks ($5,000) or to have a gallery owner stroll in and buy them out.

Some shows, they do very well. Some are total busts.

Steve and Zoe make mosaics. They aren't out to make millions.

So what they count on more than anything is that those who see their art get a portion, a tiny fragment, of the joy they take in creating it.

Like the woman in an orange shirt who bounds into the art tent in Sarasota.

"Oh, look! Oh, what fun! Oh, how clever!" she says. She is practically skipping. She plays chopsticks on the kiddie piano in the Joyful Noise grandfather clock. She fingers the Mighty Love wall pocket. She stares at her reflection in the Practice Hygiene mirror studded with china pockets for tweezers and toothbrushes and Q-tips.

"Practice hygiene every day," she reads slowly, following the sentence across the surface, "or your friends will go away."

"Isn't that cute?" The woman giggles.

Zoe watches in awe, like she can't quite believe it, any of it, to this day. "Mission accomplished," she whispers.

Nancy Imperiale can be reached at nimperiale@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6323.