I ordered a kilo of smalti in a colour that only exists in my head
Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time.
Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone.
The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind.
Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists.
Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.
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The blue being "the same as last time" is the whole problem, no? Pigments and glass batches drift and the man at the table genuinely cannot see it, he's looking at the label and not at the thing. You did the right test, window then lamp then pavement, that's the only way to catch it. Bought the kilo, so it's moot now, but the older batch was worth it.
I paint in oil, so smalti is not my material, but the same thing happens with a tube of terre verte that suddenly turns chalky between one lot and the next. You learn to hoard the good one and hoard it quietly, because once it's gone nobody will admit it was ever different.
The sea wall with three greys and the mortar eaten out, that's a good subject. The patched concrete is where the light actually does something. Voilà.
The window-lamp-pavement thing sounds insane to anyone who hasn't done it, but that's the whole job. My glazes do the same, I have a celadon that reads grey under my studio light and goes properly green the second it's outside, so now I do the full tour like a madman before I commit to a bucket.
Quiet hoarding of the good one though, that's real. I've got a jar of a batch I can't get again sitting on the shelf and I won't use it because then it's gone. Which is stupid, I know. A material you're scared to use is just decoration.
Celadon is worse than blue, I think. Blue at least lies to you honestly. Green just changes its mind every time you walk it past a doorway.
And yes, a material you're scared to use is just decoration. That's the sentence. I have a drawer of half kilos from dead batches and I know exactly which ones I'm never touching, and it's not because they're precious, it's because I'd have to look at the empty space after. Which is a whole other problem and not one I'm fixing today.
Going to use the new kilo tomorrow anyway. Badly, probably. The first row on a sea wall is always bad.
Exactly. He's reading the invoice, I'm looking at the glass. Two different jobs.
And the hoarding quietly part, yes. I have a drawer of half kilos from batches that don't exist anymore, and I don't talk about it in front of clients. They hear "I ran out of that one" and think you're disorganised, not that the material literally stopped being made.
The terre verte thing is real too. Any pigment ground from actual earth is going to move on you, the deposit changes, the grind changes. It's the same with stone for me. I've got tesserae cut from the same marble block that don't match each other, because one end of the block had more iron in it. Forty centimetres apart in the quarry and they behave like strangers.
Does the celadon going grey under studio light change how you glaze, or do you just accept it and light the room differently?