Fifteen years of scraps in jars, and today one of them became the sky
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.
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Twelve years of blues in jars, and the ones you needed were already there. That is not a sickness, it is a kind of patience you were keeping without knowing.
I work with cyanotype, so I know something of this, the deep Prussian blue, how much it depends on time and the day's light. I keep every failed print too. My partner calls it the graveyard shelf. But often the piece I am stuck on gets resolved by something from two summers ago.
The part about hoarding and then running out anyway, that made me smile. Almost as if the jars were waiting for you to finally need them.
The graveyard shelf, I like that. Cyanotype blues are a different animal though, all that chemistry and the sun deciding on the day. Do you find you can read the years in them? My jars I can, mostly. The 2011 marble I could point to blind. Twelve years of blue and I never once looked at the shelf as stock, it was just... there, like a wall I walked past. Then suddenly it is the whole sky and I am picking through it like a market stall.
Waiting is a nice way to put it. I think I just could not throw away a century-old piece of glass because it made my drawer messy. But yes. Maybe the same thing with better manners.