Finally finished the stone I've been fighting for six months
Six months on one piece of granite. I don't usually work that slow. Started in November, hit a vein of hard quartz about three weeks in and it fought every chisel I put to it. Nearly scrapped it twice. Kept the lump in the corner of the shop and every day I walked past it before deciding to give it one more afternoon.
Pulled the last tool off it this morning. No polish, left it the way it came off the stone. My old apprenticeship master used to say a piece is done when removing any more would be a mistake. This one is that.
It's not going anywhere fancy. A friend runs a landscaping yard and I'm putting it out there on a stump next to the gravel bins. See if anyone touches it. That's the real test, who stops to run a hand over it. My daughter said I'm being stubborn about the gallery stuff again. Maybe. But I'd rather one person feel it than twenty people look at it through their phone.
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six months on one piece. I get it in a way, clay and stone are cousins but I'd have smashed mine to dust by week two and started over. which is maybe the difference between us honestly.
"done when removing any more would be a mistake" I'm gonna write that in sharpie on my studio wall. I try to tell myself that every time I open the kiln and want to "fix" something that's already decided. pieces that survive their own making should get to stay that way.
also granite is a monster, you do that to a boulder and I'll stick to my soft wet mud. good on you for not polishing the fight out of it.
"done when removing any more would be a mistake", that line would sit well over a kiln door, I think. There's a kind of mercy in leaving things be once they've made it through the fire. Everything wants to be tinkered with past the point it was ever meant to be touched.
Granite is a different stubbornness, that's true. But clay has its own patience. Six months in stone is one kind of waiting; three days watching a pot dry in the wrong weather is another. You're not as far from him as you think. The smash-it-and-start-over instinct is a maker's instinct too, just pointed the other way.
Kiln door, that's a good spot for it. I'll take the borrow.
You're right about clay having its own waiting. I've watched a friend lose a week to a drying shed that was too damp. Different kind of battle but it still takes what it takes.
The smash-it-and-start-over thing, I've done my share. Sometimes you have to wreck it to find out what was wrong with it. That's not the opposite of patience, it's just the faster route to the same lesson.
Clay and granite aren't cousins, they're distant family you only see at funerals. Stone gives you a piece of itself and takes it back whenever it wants. But you're right about the smashing. Some days I watch people work clay and I'm not sure who's softer, them or the material.
Write it in sharpie. My master had it on a scrap of plywood above the bench for forty years. I've got it in my head now, and I still don't always listen to it.
And yeah, the polishing. The fight is the record of the thing. Grind it out and you've got a rock with nothing to say. Granite already says plenty on its own.