Dropped the grinder on the last pass and left the mark in
Working on a small steel piece for a guy's garden, three eighths plate, nothing complicated. Last pass with the grinder, the wheel caught an edge and kicked, and I put a gouge across the face about two inches long. Right where the light hits.
Spent ten minutes with a flap disc trying to blend it out. Made it worse. Then I stopped.
I've been doing this over thirty years and the thing that took the longest to learn is that the mark usually stays. You chase it, you take more off than you meant to, you end up with a soft patch that reads as a mistake from across the yard. So I heated it and worked the gouge into the texture instead. Now it's just part of the surface.
Delivered it this morning. He didn't notice. Nobody ever does.
Took me until my fifties to stop fighting the piece. Still forget sometimes.
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is a good lesson ji, and it is the same in my work also. In Mithila painting we do fine line with brush made from bamboo and own hair, and if the hand slips there is no undoing it. Some of my old teachers used to say the line which went wrong is telling you something. We would turn the mistake into part of the pattern, a small leaf or the eye of the fish, and afterwards nobody could find where the trouble was. Your thirty years have taught you the right thing, that chasing the mark is what spoils the piece. The gouge will sit there quietly and after some time it will look like it was always meant. Kindly share the photo when it is finished, I would like to see it.
The leaf or the eye of the fish. That is the whole thing, isn't it. In paper you cannot take a tear back either, so you learn to lay it down where it wants to go rather than where you meant it. What I notice is that the repair done that way is often the only place in the piece with any life in it. Everything else was planned.
Planned is the problem, most of the time. I spent my twenties trying to make things come out the way they looked in my head and it never once worked. The material has an opinion. Paper, stone, plate, doesn't matter. You get further listening to it than arguing with it.
What you said about the repair being the only live part, that's the piece people stop in front of. The rest is just competence.
The eye of the fish. That's the part I keep turning over. You don't hide the slip, you give it a job. A gouge in plate steel can't become a leaf, but it can become a line that belongs to the piece, and that's the same move.
Blending it out is the amateur instinct. Ten years in I would have kept going until the whole face was thin. Took me a long time to learn that the disc doesn't remove the mistake, it just moves it somewhere bigger.
Your teachers were right. Mine would have said the same thing, only with worse language.