i finally cleaned the salt crust off my work table and now it feels wrong
there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything.
so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing.
i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
I understand the impulse to go mess it up again, but maybe give it a day or two first. A clean table can show you things about your process that the crust was hiding. I notice things about my palette when I scrape it clean that I don't see midway through a session, colours I've been avoiding, mixtures I fall back on without thinking.
The salt sounds interesting, by the way. Do you find it affects the paper's absorbency in a way you can predict now, or is it still partly chance?
ah you're dead right about the clean surface showing you things, i'd say that's true for any medium. there's something about a reset that forces you to actually look instead of just working off habit and momentum.
the salt thing though, that's gas altogether, i love it. i've never heard of anyone doing that. is it local seawater you're using or do you mix your own? i'm imagining the crust building up like a stalactite situation over months. fair play for finally tackling it, i'd have let it grow till i couldn't get the door open.
local, straight from the atlantic. i go down with a couple of jerry cans when the tide's right. there's something in the particular mineral mix here, the way the light hits the paper after, i can't recreate it with shop salt.
the stalactite is not far off. i'd been nudging the drying prints over to make room for new ones instead of ever cleaning. it was getting archaeological. but you're right, i probably would have just kept going till the door got involved.
you might be right. i sat down with coffee just staring at the clean wood and it did feel like seeing the table for the first time in months. there's a grain i'd forgotten.
the salt, partly chance, always. i can steer it a little by how long i leave the paper in the seawater, or if i let it dry flat vs tilted. but the tide doesn't do the same thing twice. that's sort of the point for me.