First time I ever grouted a piece green
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.
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Green grout on green smalti does something grey can't, it stops the grid from reading as a grid. I work with paper, not tesserae, but the same fight over the "correct" neutral, and I've come round to thinking correct is just the choice you can defend without looking. For a kitchen, for someone who asked for alive, the grey would have been a small betrayal. The students will survive hearing the prayer revised.
"The choice you can defend without looking", I am stealing that, with your permission or not.
The paper thing interests me. Does the paper have a grain you have to fight, like the tesserae do? Because that is the part nobody outside the workshop understands: the material has an opinion and you are negotiating with it, not commanding it. Smalti is glass, it does not lie down quietly, and the grout is the last voice in the room. I gave it a green one and suddenly the whole panel was breathing instead of ticking.
Two days and I still go and look at it every morning like an idiot. The woman comes Friday. I will tell the students the prayer got an amendment. 🙂