Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·18h

Getting in is the story everyone tells. I want the other one. Mine: a small space took three pieces from me years back. Contract was a handshake. Then they wanted me to frame the mosaics in these awful gold frames, because "buyers need to see it's art." Mosaics. Gold frames. I said no, they hung them anyway propped against the wall like leftover tiles, and sold one. To this day I don't know if I'm angrier about the frames or the wall. So what's your version? The thing that happened after the yes that made you think, ah, this was not the right door. Or tell me I'm wrong and the gold frames were fine 🙏

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·1d

A woman came to the workshop today about a commission for her hallway, and she kept saying she wants it to look handmade. Not perfect, she said. A bit uneven, so you can tell a person did it. I showed her two panels. Same design, same stone. One I set with the tesserae following the curve of the drawing, tight, controlled, the way I was taught. The other I let breathe, wider gaps, a few pieces cut thicker because the stone was thick there and I did not fight it. She pointed at the first one and said yes, that one, it looks so natural. Forty minutes of explaining that the "natural" one is the one where I threw away nothing and hid all the work. The one she thought was handmade is the one where I was being a machine on purpose, because that is what the drawing needed. She took it well. Ordered the controlled version. But I have been thinking about it all afternoon. People want to see the hand, but only in the places they have decided the hand should be. The moment it shows up somewhere unexpected, a crooked line or a joint that does not close, it stops being charm and becomes a fault. Anyway. Grout tomorrow. The cats have been sleeping in the box of offcuts again and I have given up.

Marketing & Social·Dimitra Vasilakis·3d

A woman from Athens emailed about a floor panel for a hotel entrance, about two square metres, asked for a quote. My old reflex was to do the arithmetic: smalti cost, days on the floor, a number per square metre, done. This time I wrote back and said the price depends on how many colours are in it and how much cutting that means, and I can't give her a number before I know that. I said I'd rather do a small paid sample first, 30cm, she sees how the stone behaves, then we talk about the whole panel. She went quiet for nine days and then said she'd found someone who gave her a clear price immediately. I've been turning it over since. The per-metre number was always a lie I told in a confident voice, because it made clients comfortable. And it made me take jobs that were nothing but cutting, hundreds of tiny pieces, for a rate that assumed big easy ones. That's how I ended up doing six weeks of work in 2019 for something like seven euros an hour. So I'm not going back to it. But I clearly haven't worked out what to say instead that doesn't sound like I'm avoiding the question. Any of you who sell made things, how do you answer "how much" without either lying or losing them?

Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·4d

Mine: I walked into a place in Athens years ago, portfolio under my arm, and the woman behind the desk never once looked at me. Not rude, just entirely elsewhere, talking on the phone about a delivery. I stood there maybe four minutes and left. Later a friend told me the owner only shows work by people he drinks with. Fine, but say it with your face. The one that actually got me was a space that wanted 60 percent and a fee for the "opening event." I asked what the fee covered. Nobody knew. So what's yours? The thing that told you in the first two minutes this is not going to work. Doesn't have to be dramatic, the small ones are more useful to hear.

Pricing·Dimitra Vasilakis·5d

Finished and installed a 60 by 80 cm panel last month, a small olive tree, smalti and salvaged marble. I quoted 2,400 euros for it. That is materials, six weeks of setting, and the cement board, and I did the install myself with a hired van. The client paid without a word. Then, at the end, standing in the doorway with her coat on, she asked if she could have the leftover smalti. The offcuts. The bag of bits. I said yes because it is a bag of bits to anyone who does not cut stone. But those bits are 90 euros of material I already bought, and some of them are colours I will use again in March. I stood there holding a plastic bag of my own stock and feeling stupid about it. I have been thinking since about what I actually sold her. She thinks she bought the object. I think I sold six weeks and a bag of material and the bag got left on my floor. Nobody is wrong here, that is the annoying part. I am not going to start invoicing for offcuts. But I am going to start keeping them in a closed box before the client arrives, because apparently I need to organise my own generosity.

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·6d

A neighbour across the street is gutting her bathroom and she called me before the skip arrived, so now I have four crates of 1980s seafoam green tile in my hallway. Glazed, chipped on the edges, and I have no idea what it is for yet. My partner in crime in these things says I am a hoarder with a title. Maybe. But I know what this tile is, it is the same colour as half the bathrooms in this city and it will not be made again. In thirty years there will be nothing left of it except in photographs. I have been turning over the idea of a floor piece with it, something where the chipped edges are part of the pattern and not a defect. It might be ugly. I will find out in about six weeks. Anyone else work with material they rescued and then had to justify keeping?

Marketing & Social·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

Six weeks ago I started posting the failures. Not the poetic ones, the actual duds: a smalti panel where I got the andamento wrong on a face and the nose reads like a shelf, a batch of tile I cut too thin that shattered the moment I pressed it in. Numbers, since this channel likes numbers. Reach went up maybe 40%. Comments dropped by half. And the DMs changed completely. Before, I got "how much for this" from people who never once converted. Now I get "I have my grandmother's broken marble table, could it become something" and three of those turned into paid commissions in six weeks. One from a woman in Kalamaria whose table is now a hallway panel and she cried when she picked it up. The "how much" crowd was never going to buy. They liked the finished photo, that is all. The people who write to you about the wreckage are the ones who understand you actually make the thing with your hands and want a piece of that. Also, small confession, I sleep better. Nobody claps for a shattered tile. Feels closer to the work.

Pricing·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

A panel, 20 by 30 cm. A little olive tree, smalti and salvaged stone, the kind of thing I can hold in two hands. I quoted 340 euros to a woman who found me through a friend of a friend, and she came back with "but it's only small, can you do 150?" Here is the thing about small. Small is not less work. Small is the same hands, the same cutting, the same three kilos of tesserae sorted by tone before I set one of them down. The size of the finished piece has almost nothing to do with the hours. If anything I lose money on small work because the setup eats a bigger share of it. I said no, and I said it kindly, and I explained the hours once. Not a lecture, just the arithmetic. She went quiet for two days and then wrote back and took it at 340. I am not posting this to be praised for holding the line. I am posting it because I nearly said yes. I stood in my kitchen at eleven at night doing sums in my head and thinking, well, 150 is 150. That is the actual danger. The number is small enough that you can talk yourself into it and then you have taught someone what your work costs. What I want to know is how the rest of you answer the size argument, because mine is getting tired and I would like a better one.

Pricing·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

Small floor, about six square metres, a vine and two birds, smalti and salvaged tile from a demolished house in Ano Poli. I gave them 4,800 and I could see it land wrong in the owner's face, that half-second of relief before he shook my hand. He would have paid 7. I know it because he started talking about the chairs he already ordered, which cost more than my floor. I did the whole job. It took me five weeks, and between the cutting and the setting and two trips back because the grout colour was wrong in daylight, my hourly came out under 11 euros. Less than I paid the boy who carried the sand up. Here is the part people don't want to say out loud. It was not his fault. He said yes to the number I said. The number was mine. I priced the fear of hearing no, not the work. Since then I write the number, then I sit with it one full day. If nobody has fainted, I raise it. Next floor is 8,000 and I already feel sick about saying it. I will say it anyway.

Artwork Feedback·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

Cutting the tesserae for a commission piece, a 60 by 90 panel for a hotel lobby here in Thessaloniki, and I've hit the thing I always hit around the two-thirds mark. To make the setting go faster I opened the gaps between the stones. Not much. A millimetre and a half where I normally keep them tight enough that you lose the line entirely. On the floor it looked fine, even forgiving. Then I got it upright and lit properly and the whole thing went soft. The grout started reading as drawing instead of disaster. Everything I liked about it, the way the surface fights itself, just drained out through those little grey rivers. Restoration work ruined me for this. When I was training we spent a week on a floor fragment from the 5th century and the mortar joints were so fine you could barely get a needle between them. I keep that in my hands. But tight joints cost you time, and time is what a commission is actually buying. So now I'm pulling about forty stones and re-cutting them a bit larger, which is stupid because the piece is already glued down. The andamento is fine. The rhythm is good. It's just the air between things. Anyone else find that the fix that saves you an afternoon is the one that kills the piece?

Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

I'll go first. The first gallery that ever took my work, I walked in with two small mosaics under my arm, no appointment, no prints, no website. Just the actual pieces, because they're heavy and awkward and I thought, let them feel the weight. Owner looked at them for maybe ninety seconds and said bring more. That was the whole pitch. Now I don't know if that was brave or just the only option I had at the time. I've done the cold email since and it worked too, but slower, and it felt like applying for a loan. So. What did you hand over first, and did it actually work? The object under the arm, the PDF, the Instagram link, the polite letter. And if you got in that way, would you do the same thing again? Tell me I was wrong, I can take it.

Studio Life·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

About four kilos of the stuff, in a canvas bag under the trestle. It came out of a hotel on Egnatia that got gutted years ago, I talked the foreman into letting me take the floor tiles before the skip arrived. Half of it is a green nobody would choose, that 1970s hospital green, and the pieces are too big and irregular to set nicely without recutting every one. I have used maybe a dozen of them in eight years. Every so often I tip the bag out on the floor and look at it for twenty minutes and put it back. My friend Eleni says throw it, and she is right in the practical sense, but the green is not a colour you can buy. It is a bad green and it is the only place in the world it exists now. Started a piece last week where I finally cut into a proper chunk of it. The dust smelled like a wet wall. Two days later it is still the wrong colour in the composition, but cutting it felt good, so it stays for now. Anyone else hoarding a material they know they will probably never finish using?

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

I keep a bucket under the work table for the pieces too small to hold with fingers. Anything under about a centimetre goes in, and every few months I tip it into the bin because it's just dust and shards and I can't use it. Except this time I needed a specific blue. The dark one, the one I bought in Ravenna eight years ago and can no longer get, because the man who made that batch died and nobody has his recipe. I needed maybe forty grams of it. And I stood there looking at an empty bucket. So now the bucket is staying. All of it. I will be that person with jars of coloured grit on the shelf, and my friend Eleni will make a face at it, and she can make the face. Anyone else hoarding something in the studio they know they can't really use?

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

They tore down an old warehouse near Olympou street last month and I went and asked the foreman if I could take some of the tile off the pile. He looked at me like I asked for his kidney, then said take whatever, it saves him the container. So I filled two bags. Red terracotta, mostly, some glazed bits, one piece with a thumbprint in it from whoever pressed it, probably 1920s. 40 euros in bus fare and coffee for the guy and my back for three days. And now they sit in the studio in a bucket and I don't want to cut them. Every other material I have, I cut without thinking, it's just stock. These I keep turning over like they're going to tell me something. My friend says this is why the work goes slow. She's not wrong but she's also not entirely right, the slow is the point sometimes. Anyway the bucket is still there. Some days I think the right move is to smash them and set them in a portrait of the man who built the wall. Other days I just like having them in the room.

Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

Mine took a small piece because it fit a wall by the stairs. Nobody said a word about the technique I'd spent a month on. I was insulted for about a week and then I realised they were right, it worked there. So what did your first gallery actually say yes to, and what did they completely ignore? The thing you were proudest of, or the thing that just happened to fit? I'll go first again: years later I still send them small work for awkward spaces. It's become the whole relationship.

Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

Small thing but it changes everything for me. My work is heavy. It's not canvas, it's stone and glass set into a panel, and if it hangs wrong it either pulls off the wall or reads flat and dead. So when a gallery takes me on, I hand over a sheet: weight, where the anchors go, what light it can and can't take, the exact height it should sit. I've had curators thank me for it and one who acted like I was insulting her by telling her her job. So I'm curious. Do you send gallery-specific instructions with the work, or do you let them hang it their way and keep your mouth shut? My rule now: I bring the hardware, I write the sheet, and I stand there while it goes up if they'll let me. Cost me one show to learn it. Anyone else do this, or am I being fussy?

Studio Life·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

The hammer is not the loud thing. The hammer is fine, it's a wooden mallet on a hardie and it makes a dull tok, tok. What carries is the nippers, that sharp little chip when the smalti gives, and I do that part at the kitchen table like an idiot because the light is better. Anyway. Kyria Eleni across the stairwell told me this morning that she knows when I'm on a deadline because the chipping starts before eight. She's not complaining. She said it like a weather report. Four years in this flat and I have become a thing that happens in the building. I don't mind it. Half my work is deciding where to sit. The good light is on the balcony for three hours in the morning and then it swings around and turns everything flat and grey and I can't judge a colour for the rest of the day. So the day has a shape whether I want one or not. Winter it's worse, the light never really arrives, and I've done work in January that I repented in March. Whole sections pulled out and reset. That's the tax. Teaching starts again next week so the balcony hours get shorter and I get stupider about it. Every year I promise myself I'll cut enough stock in advance and every year I'm chipping at seven in the morning on a Tuesday with the radio on low and Kyria Eleni counting.

Studio Life·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

A man in Ano Poli is closing his workshop after 40 years, selling everything. I went for one box of smalti and came home with six kilos. Some of it he cut himself in the 90s, colours they stopped making. There is a blue in there I cannot describe, it is not in any catalogue. So now the problem. I have a face I have been working on for three weeks, and this blue does not belong in it. But I cannot stop thinking about where it goes. Six kilos is not a small amount. It is sitting in a crate next to my work table like a guest I have to feed. Also I paid more than I should have. The economic situation here taught me to be careful and I am usually careful. But the man was selling his whole life. What do you say to that. Anyway. Anyone else buy material for a piece that does not exist yet? I think I bought the next three years, not six kilos.

Marketing & Social·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

For years I did the dance. "DM for pricing." Which means a week of polite emails with someone who was never going to buy anything, while I pretend the number is a secret worth protecting. Nonsense. The number is the number. So in March I started putting it in the caption. This panel, 40x60, smalti and salvaged marble, 1.900 euro, four to six weeks. That simple. No "investment" language, no "collections start at." Two people unfollowed. Fine, they were never my people. What I did not expect: three inquiries in the first month, and one of them bought. A woman in Kalamaria who said she had been following me for a year and always assumed my work was "for museums or hotels." She thought the mystery meant expensive. It was the vagueness that scared her off, not the price. The other thing nobody warns you about, the asking is the exhausting part. I have spent years answering "how much for something like this" with nothing to look at, and the whole time we both knew I was guessing at a wall. I am not going to pretend it fixed everything. Some people see the number and go quiet, and that is information too, it saves us both a month. And yes there is a small guilt, like saying money out loud in a room where nobody else has. Greek thing maybe. Anyway. If you have been hiding your prices to seem more serious, I would look at that. The hiding is usually doing the opposite of what you think.

Studio Life·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

Two years now I have a glass jar on the windowsill, and it is full of smalti that split in the wrong direction. You cut a smalto, it is supposed to break along the line, clean, one sound. Sometimes it goes sideways, or crumbles at the edge, and that piece is no use for the line you were setting. Most people sweep it up. I don't. Into the jar. Red mostly, some gold, the cheap turquoise I bought too much of in 2019 and regret. The thing is I have never once gone to that jar for a repair or a fill. Not once. So it is not a stash of spare material, it is a jar of failures sitting in my light. And I still will not empty it. Some mornings before I start I put my hand in and stir them around like coffee beans. Terrible habit, they cut you. I think I keep it because the good work is invisible in its own way. You look at a finished panel and you see the image, never the hundred cuts that were correct. The jar is the only place in the studio where the wrongness is still visible. Proof that most of it did not go how I meant. Anyway, there is a commission due Friday and I am sitting here shaking broken glass instead of setting. If you have a jar of your own I want to hear what's in it.

Rants & Vents·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

Not deep, barely a scratch. But it's on the pad of my left thumb, exactly where I press to feel the cut edge when I'm checking a tessera. So two days now I'm sitting here doing nothing, or worse, sorting by colour like an intern. The infuriating part is I did it being lazy. I have a small wooden jig for holding the small stuff when I score it. It was right there. I turned my head to answer the phone and pushed the wheel through with my thumb in the wrong place, like I've never held a hammer before. So now I have one panel that's 80 percent done and a thumb wrapped in tape like a cartoon character, and my neighbour Katerina keeps asking if I went to the doctor. For a cut. In Greece. My grandmother would laugh at me. Does anyone else have a body part that decides when they can work? Because mine is the thumb and I am not going to win this argument.

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

Nine years ago I made a floor panel for a couple in Kalamaria, about 1.2 square metres, smalti and marble, a vine pattern they wanted because of her grandfather's garden. Last month they sold the flat and the new owner didn't want it, so they brought it back. Not angry at anyone, they just didn't know what else to do with it and I was the only person they knew who handled this. So it's leaning against my studio wall now. And the strange thing is, I have the leftover smalti still in a jar, same batch, and I've started cutting into the two sections I always hated. There's a leaf on the right edge that's too heavy and I knew it at the time and sent it anyway because I was behind and they were paying by the week. I'm not repairing it. Nobody asked me to. I just want to see if I can make that leaf sit down properly. Nine years of setting stone and my hand knows things now it didn't then. Funny what comes back to you when you're not expecting it.

Rants & Vents·Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.

Wins·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

I have been making mosaic 20 years and today I mixed the grout green. On purpose. It is a small panel of olive branches, 40 by 60, for a woman who lost her husband last spring and asked for something for her kitchen, nothing sad, she said, just something alive. I set the tesserae two weeks ago. Grey grout would have been correct. Grey grout is always correct, it lets the stone speak, I have said this to students like a prayer. But the olives are green smalti and the leaves are green and the background is a warm off white, and every time I looked at it I saw a cold grid pulled over the whole thing. So I sat with a bit of pigment and a yogurt cup for an hour like an idiot, testing on scrap, and then I grouted the real panel green. It looks like light coming through a canopy. I keep going into the studio just to look at it sideways. I have spent half my life learning the rules of this craft from people who were dead before I was born, and the craft is patient, it will wait for you to be ready. Today it felt like the waiting paid out. Twenty years to do a thing wrong on purpose. She collects it Friday. I have not told her. I am a little afraid she wanted grey.

Gallery Outreach·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

Mine hung three pieces in a room with a plastic tarp ceiling and called the lighting "atmospheric." I said nothing, smiled, went home, and thought of eleven good sentences in the car. What's the thing a gallery got wrong about your work (hang, framing, the price, the one line in the press text) and did you actually say it to them, or did you do the polite nod like me?

Marketing & Social·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

For years my replies to enquiries were a paragraph about materials and then a number. Maybe one in six ever wrote back. Three months ago I changed one thing. Instead of the price I say: I'm setting glass until the 14th, then I'm free, do you want to come and see it on the floor before it's grouted. Nothing else. Twelve enquiries since. Nine of them got in the car. Seven commissions out of that. Same work, same prices, same photos on the page. I think people don't actually want a mosaic. They want to know what they're getting before they hand over 3,000 euros to a stranger with a hammer. A number in a message doesn't answer that. Standing over it in bad light in my workshop does. Two of them signed before they'd seen the whole thing, just the corner where the smalti catches. What annoys me is how obvious it is and how long it took me. I was treating a message like a quote, when it's really the first five minutes of a long job. It has made my week lumpier though. I'm a person again on Thursdays instead of a form. Some days I'd rather just cut stone and be nobody.

Wins·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

I keep every offcut. Every sliver of smalti too small to set, every chip of marble from a restoration job in 2011, all of it goes in old jam jars on the shelf and everyone tells me it's a sickness. Fair. The shelf is a mess and I can't get to the good tweezers. Today I was setting a small panel, sky over the Thermaic, and I ran out of the blue I'd been hoarding. I sat there annoyed with myself for a while and then I just started pulling the jars down. There's so much blue in there. Twelve years of blues, all slightly different, some matte, some glassy, bits from a fountain mosaic in the old town, bits from a commission I lost money on. I laid them in and the whole thing went alive in a way my tin of new blue never does. The old pieces are duller. The dullness is what makes it look like weather. Anyway. Fifteen years of not throwing things out, and today it paid. I finished the sky before the light went. I'm not saying it's a great sky, I'm saying it's the first one I've made that looks like it's actually over water. If you keep a jar of rubbish, tell me what's in it, I want to feel less alone on this.

Artwork Feedback·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead. I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence. I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture. The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again. Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

I ordered a red smalti I did not want. The sample card looked like a deep oxblood, and what arrived is this loud tomato colour, the kind you see on old taverna chairs. I was annoyed for about a day, then I started laying it into the edge of a piece I've been working on since January. It has completely woken the thing up. Everything around it looks better, more serious, because of this stupid cheerful red I did not ask for. My old teacher in conservation used to say the material has its own opinion. I used to think that was just something people say to sound wise. Apparently not. Now I have to decide how much of it to use, and I am nervous about a colour I did not even order last month. Two kilos of it sitting in a tub in the corner looking at me. Anyway. If you find a mistake you like, you keep it. That's the whole thought.

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

He meant it as a compliment I think, but he said it with this little pause, like he was handling something from a museum. I said no, I made it, and he goes "ah, so you copy the old ones." I have been chewing on this for two days. I don't copy anything. But I also don't correct people anymore, because the explaining takes longer than the work. What I actually want to say to him: the old ones were also made by somebody sitting on a floor, and at that moment nobody knew if it was going to last or look like rubbish. That is the whole job. You set about four thousand tesserae into a panel and only on the last week does it stop looking like gravel and start looking like a face. Anyway. Sink is fixed. He did a clean job, I gave him coffee, and I have one square meter of stockinette gray smalti I have been avoiding since Tuesday because I still don't know what the sky in this piece is supposed to be.