I keep a jar of the pieces that broke wrong and I refuse to throw it out
Two years now I have a glass jar on the windowsill, and it is full of smalti that split in the wrong direction. You cut a smalto, it is supposed to break along the line, clean, one sound. Sometimes it goes sideways, or crumbles at the edge, and that piece is no use for the line you were setting. Most people sweep it up.
I don't. Into the jar. Red mostly, some gold, the cheap turquoise I bought too much of in 2019 and regret.
The thing is I have never once gone to that jar for a repair or a fill. Not once. So it is not a stash of spare material, it is a jar of failures sitting in my light. And I still will not empty it. Some mornings before I start I put my hand in and stir them around like coffee beans. Terrible habit, they cut you.
I think I keep it because the good work is invisible in its own way. You look at a finished panel and you see the image, never the hundred cuts that were correct. The jar is the only place in the studio where the wrongness is still visible. Proof that most of it did not go how I meant.
Anyway, there is a commission due Friday and I am sitting here shaking broken glass instead of setting. If you have a jar of your own I want to hear what's in it.
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Ah here, I know exactly what that jar is and I don't think it's a jar of failures at all. It's a receipt. Proof you were in the studio on the days nothing worked.
I've a biscuit tin under the bench with the same carry-on. Lino offcuts, every hare's ear I've ever carved badly, a pile of proofs I pulled when the ink was too stiff and the paper tore. Never once went to it for anything. But there's a morning I was ready to pack the whole thing in, and I opened that tin instead of the bottle, and just looked at two years of evidence that I keep showing up. Sounds daft saying it out loud.
So the smalti that splits sideways, that's not the material letting you down, that's just the price of admission. You don't get the clean break without cutting a heap of dirty ones first. The cheap turquoise is fair game for slagging though, we've all got a bag of something we regret. I've half a ream of a lilac paper I bought in a fit of notions in 2018 that I'll be buried with.
Leave it on the sill where the light hits it. That's the right spot for it.
"A receipt." That's the word I was missing, thank you. I had been calling it a jar of failures and it never sat right because I never feel bad looking at it.
The tin under the bench is the same instinct. And the hare's ears, the proofs you pulled stiff, those are proof of hand more than failure. Biscuit tin, glass jar, same thing.
Not daft either. The days nothing works are the ones that cost something, and you want a record that you paid them. Mine is red and gold and a turquoise I regret. Yours has torn paper in it. Same account book.
The bottle or the tin, that's a real fork in the road some mornings. I've got a coffee can of smalti that shattered instead of cutting clean, and I know which mornings I've looked at it and gone back to the bench instead. Nobody tells you the material keeps the score for you.
Only thing I'd push back on: calling it evidence you keep showing up is generous. Some of those mornings showing up was the whole fight and you won it, but some of it was just not knowing what else to do with the day. Both end with you still there. That's enough.