Chris Jones hard at work inside his workshop in Perth, Australia.

AS A travelling man, Chris Jones has stories to tell and smashed tiles to tell them with.

His art has been glued to every corner of the globe.

It’s a running theme for the self-taught mosaicist who has pieced together majestic scenes from Bondi beach to the Greek Isles.

Based in Perth, Australia, Chris is visiting Myanmar on a six-week holiday to put together a coffee table book of his mosaics. It will showcase over 500 pieces displayed in private homes, hotels, schools and businesses around the world.

The 'Ned Kelly' bathroom in Shoalhaven, Australia. Pic: courtesy of Chris Jones

It’s through these mosaics that Chris has managed to bring his two passions to life: travel and art.

"It used to be a hobby and it's only recently that I started to call myself a mosaicist," he says.

It has taken 20 years for Chris to acknowledge his hobby as a profession and he still does it for fun.

Take the Ned Kelly piece, a mosaic that takes up an entire bathroom of a yoga retreat three hours south of Sydney on the Shoalhaven riverbank. In the midst of Chris’ 15-year travel odyssey around Australia, he met a woman house-sitting at the retreat across from the home of two of Australia’s most famous, now deceased, artists, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. Both were obsessed with capturing the folklore surrounding bush ranger Ned Kelly and his struggle with colonial authority in the late 1800s.

Chris' mosaics cater to his clients' tastes.

Together with his new friend, they sketched up a plan and created a "Ned Kelly memorial" in the bathroom over what Chris says were many, many bottles of wine.

“That was just something we did for fun. It was free of charge,” he says casually.

Although Chris’ works can go for anything from US$500 to over $30,000, many of his greatest pieces, he says, were done for cases of beer and to give himself something to do during his travels.

In 1994, long before Chris began calling himself a mosaicist, he bought a Cadillac and drove around the United States for 10 months.

"As I sat at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, staring at a half-finished mosaic wall, I leered over the counter towards the bar owner and informed him that my profession consisted of finishing other people’s half-baked attempts at art in exchange for unlimited beer and the odd snack."

The bar owner accepted and Chris spent the next few weeks finishing the job, albeit in a slightly drunken haze.

The next 15 years were spent haphazardly trotting around the globe.
He spent two and half years in Indonesia, makan angin (eating air), and a couple of years on the streets of Barcelona after his money and passport were stolen. A stint in Wellington, New Zealand, finally established him as the colourful Aussie mosaicist after he completed pieces for a handful of cafes in the cultural heart of Kiwiland.

Once he had a bit of experience under his belt, the offers started pouring in from businesses, government agencies, libraries and schools, and all of a sudden Chris was an art teacher.

“It’s great,” he says. “All you have to do is show them how to do it and they go for it. Kids love doing stuff like this.”

He continued to travel around Australia working with kids on school murals and library walls, but there’s no place like home, even for the intrepid traveller. Chris ended up back in his hometown of Perth and set up shop as a base for his thousands of mirrors and wall hangings.

Chris mainly sticks to ceramic tiles to create his masterpieces but he also uses glass, marble and cement. It takes him up to three days to complete an average sized wall hanging and up to three weeks for anything bigger such as the bathroom.

“I live from commission to commission,” he confesses, but admits it’s still enough to shout friends on wild adventures across Asia.

“I’m coming back to Myanmar next year,” he says. “There’s something I want to work on with a friend and I need to see the rest of the country.”

He hasn’t left Yangon in the six weeks he has been here since working on his book has taken up so much of his time, but he says he likes what he’s seen so far, especially in the people.

“I’m impressed with Yangon. I love the colonial buildings. I’ve yet to see an argument.”

Once he gets back home, Chris wants to set up a distribution deal with a company to distribute his book across Asia.