Found the right red after four months of looking
Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong.
Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros.
I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂
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ohhhh this is such a satisfying story 😭 the way you found it when you weren't even looking, that's how the good stuff always happens, isn't it? four months is brutal though, i totally get that wrong-wrong-wrong spiral where every attempt just makes you more convinced the thing doesn't exist anymore. what's the first piece you're gonna use it in? i feel like after that kind of hunt you gotta put it somewhere that really lets it sing.
Thank you 🙏 Four months of bad reds, honestly I was starting to think I'd imagined the colour. You know that thing where you're not even sure your memory is right anymore?
I've got this piece I've been sitting on for a year, a woman's profile, half-abstract, with her hair done in waves. Every time I looked at it I knew it needed that red for the background, the deep one that makes the skin pop. So that's where it's going. She's been waiting patiently on my wall, I figure she's earned it.