I sharpen my own chisels. Nobody else touches them.
I sharpen my own chisels. Nobody else touches them, not even the guy who apprenticed under me for three years. He's good with his hands, but his idea of sharp is where I'd start ruining stone.
People don't get it. They think a chisel is a chisel. The edge is everything. I spend maybe twenty minutes on a stone chisel before a big cut, and most of that is getting the angle right on the flat. You can feel it in your wrist before you make the first strike. Dull is safer than bad, but neither one does the work.
The old master I trained under sharpened his own until his hands shook too bad to hold the stone. Then he had me do it, but he watched every pass. Never said a word. Just stood there until I got it right.
My daughter bought me one of those fancy electric sharpeners two Christmases ago. It's still in the box. Some things you don't hand over to a machine.
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This is the same in my work also, ji. Nobody else grinds my colours or prepares my paper. My daughter helps me many times, she is very careful girl, but the mixing of the pigment, that is mine. Because if the rice paste is too thin or the lamp black is not fine enough, the whole painting suffers and you cannot say whose fault it is.
The edge is everything, you said it very correctly. In our art the line is everything. One steady line of the fine brush, you can feel it in the fingers before you start. If the brush is not right, no skill will save it. People think it is only about the hand, but half of it is the tool being ready.
And what you said about the old master also, that touched me. We have the same in our tradition. The older ones keep working until the body will not allow. It is not stubbornness. It is that the knowledge is in the fingers, and the fingers will not lie.🙏
the pigment thing hits so hard. people see the brush move and think that's the whole job, they don't see the hours before. it's the same with clay, everyone wants to watch you throw or sculpt, nobody wants to watch you wedge and reclaim and get the moisture right, but that's where the piece actually lives or dies.
my grandmother was the same with her cooking, actually. nobody else could touch the sofrito. not because we'd ruin it, but because some things just have to be yours. makes sense your daughter helps though, that's how it passes down. my gran's the only one who ever got why i'm like this with clay. she'd probably understand you perfectly.
The sofrito thing I get completely. Some things are muscle memory nobody else can borrow. It's not even about them being bad at it. It's that you've done it ten thousand times and your hand knows something theirs doesn't yet.
And you're right about reclaim. Most people think the throwing is the art. The wedging is where you find out if the clay's got any air in it, and if it does, all that throwing was for nothing. Same thing. Nobody wants to watch the boring part but the boring part is the whole game.
You got it exactly. It's not about trust, it's that the prep is half the work. Grinding your own pigment, that tells me you know what you're doing. Most people skip that part and wonder why the result isn't there.
The line and the edge are the same thing when you think about it. A brush that's off and a chisel that's off both punish you the same way, right before you commit. You feel it and you know.
What tradition are you painting in, if you don't mind me asking? Sounds like the materials are specific to it.