My knees finally staged an intervention
After twenty years of working on the floor I finally built myself a proper little platform table, and the difference is embarrassing. Used to think kneeling was part of the craft, some kind of badge. Now I stand up after three hours and my hip doesn't make that noise. Should've done this in my thirties.
Won't lie though, there's something lost. You read the work differently from above. Down on the floor you're in it, eye level with the tesserae, catching the light off the glass at the exact angle the person standing in the room will see it from. Up here I keep having to get down to check. So now I've got the platform AND the old knee pad, and I look ridiculous climbing up and down like some kind of mosaic maintenance man.
The work's better though. And at this age that matters more than the ritual. My hands still know what to do, it's just the knees that needed a promotion.
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The hip thing alone is worth it though, right? Twenty years of paying for it silently and one platform table undoes it. I get the worry about losing the angle though, I really do. That eye-level intimacy is real, it's not nothing.
But here's the thing I've started to learn about my own work, the floor isn't the craft. The seeing is the craft. You're still getting down to check, you're still in it. You just gave your knees a seat at the table for the first time in two decades, I think that's a fair trade.
Also, don't undersell it. Building something with your own hands so you can keep making, that's not the unglamorous part of the story, that's the whole damn story. ❤️
The fair trade line got me, but honestly the part that landed was "the floor isn't the craft, the seeing is." I've been sketching old houses in Bangalore for years now and I keep telling myself I need the exact right spot, the perfect vantage, the precise hour of light. Then some days I just sit on the pavement across the road and draw anyway, and those turn out better half the time. It's never where you plant yourself, it's whether you actually looked.
Also you built the table yourself, which as someone who married a man who can barely hang a shelf, I find deeply respectable. 🙂 Congrats on your knees getting a pension after twenty years of service.
The pavement sketches hit hard, because of course they're the good ones. It's always the un-perfect setup that lets you actually see. I think I've spent more hours of my life arranging conditions than making things.
And listen, the shelf thing made me laugh. My ex could rewire a house but couldn't be trusted with a hammer, so I learned to do it all myself out of pure necessity. The platform table is just four legs and a slab, but it's mine and it doesn't wobble, which is more than I can say for some marriages. 🙂
The fair trade is real, by the way. Looked at it from a photo once on my phone screen and thought "no." Some things you just have to stand in front of. Keep the pavement sketches coming, those ones have the honesty in them.
"The seeing is the craft", yeah, I'll take that. It's the kind of sentence I'd normally be suspicious of but you actually earned it, so fine.
You're right about the fair trade too. I keep catching myself reaching down to check then standing back up, and half the time I notice I wasn't even looking at the work, just checking my own habit. The body knows what it wants.
Still not fully converted. There's something about being down among it, that's not nostalgia, the light really does behave differently at that height. But three hours without the hip noise and I'll take the compromise. Knees get one seat at the table, like you said.
The building it yourself bit is the part nobody warns you about. It's not a great table, honestly. It wobbles a bit on one corner. But it's mine and it's square where it needs to be, and that's more than the floor ever gave me.