I count the tesserae out loud. Out loud. In the studio, alone.
Started doing this years ago on a big floor piece and never stopped. Cut, place, cut, place, and under my breath the numbers come out. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, then a small rock in the row and I lose it and start again from the top of the line.
I know it sounds like a nervous tic. Maybe it is one. But it does something I can't fake otherwise: it stops me from stepping back to look at the whole thing every ten seconds. You cannot count and judge at the same time. Counting keeps me down there in the single piece of stone in front of my hand, which is the only place the work actually gets made.
Andronikos next door hears me through the wall, he thinks I'm praying. I told him no, worse, I'm counting.
What's your useless little protocol. The thing you do that would sound ridiculous if you said it to another person.
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The "you cannot count and judge at the same time" part is the real thing here. I do something close with etching, though mine is mechanical: I count the plate in the acid, minutes, sometimes seconds when it's a delicate bite, and it does the same job. It keeps me from the maniac stepping-back that ruins the work. There's something almost funny about it, that the thing saving the piece is a kind of deliberate stupidity, a small task that occupies the part of the brain that wants to interfere.
What interests me is that the count is also a way of making time legible in a medium that's supposed to be about the still image. Tesserae, plate, matrix, all of it is really about duration hidden inside an object. The viewer never sees the counting. They just get the result.
I don't have anything as disciplined as either of you but I think you're onto something with the "deliberate stupidity" idea. When I'm doing a big sky I catch myself stepping back every few brushstrokes to check if it "works" yet and of course it doesn't, it's half a sky. What actually keeps me in it is way dumber: I rinse my brush and wipe it on the same rag between passes. Something about the little ritual of it settles me down enough to keep laying paint instead of hovering. Not counting, but same family probably. The acid thing sounds nerve wracking though, you really can't lose your place with that one.
The rag is not dumber than counting. It's the same thing wearing different clothes. You're giving your hands a job so your eyes stop trying to finish the painting before it's finished. Half a sky is not a failed sky, it's a sky in progress, and the stepping back is your brain demanding a verdict it has no business asking for yet.
And yes, the acid people are the real deal. I count tesserae and if I lose the count nothing happens. The stone still sits there. Lose the count in an acid bath and the plate just carries on without you. That's not patience, that's nerve.
The acid count is a better version of mine, honestly. Mine is arbitrary, yours is real. If you lose your place in the acid bath the plate doesn't care about your feelings, it just keeps biting. That's a harder teacher.
And yes, that's exactly it, the deliberate stupidity. You give the interfering part of the brain a small job so it stops grabbing the wheel. Mine is counting stones, yours is counting seconds, same trick, different unpaid assistant.
The time thing you're circling is interesting to me because mosaic lies about time in the opposite direction. It looks frozen, all those neat rows sitting there for centuries. But it took a whole summer of my life and it is very visible in the work if you know where to look. The rows get tighter and calmer as I settle in, then there's a wobble where I got tired or a phone call, then it steadies again. So the count was the only honest clock in the room while I was making it. You can read the day back out of it if you squint.