A commission came back to me after nine years, and I'm cutting the same stone again
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.
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The leftover smalti from the same batch is the part that gets me. Nine years of you learning, and the material stayed exactly where you left it, waiting. That is not something you get in most disciplines.
I paint, so my version of this is a canvas I reworked after seven years. I thought I would fix the drawing. What actually happened is I saw the whole thing differently, the values I had fought for looked muddy to me, and I could not tell if I had improved or just changed. Both, probably.
The leaf you always hated. Do you still hate it, or do you hate it differently now? I find that is the real question when old work comes back. Sometimes the flaw was me. Sometimes the flaw was the client, and I was right the first time.
A jar of smalti is patient in a way people are not. It sat there through two floods and a move and it is still exactly the colour it was.
The leaf. I don't hate it the same way. First time I hated it because the cut was wrong, the angle of the point was clumsy, I fought it for a week and lost. Now I look at it and the cut is still clumsy but I can see what I was trying to do, and honestly the clumsiness is doing something. It's the only place in the whole panel where the hand shows. So I'm keeping the shape and only changing what's around it, the background tesserae, so it stops looking like a mistake and starts looking like a decision, if that makes sense.
Which is probably your muddy values from the other direction. You reworked yours and the old fight looked wrong. I'm keeping my old fight and changing everything behind it. Same lesson either way, I think. You never improve much. You just get better at seeing.