Ordered smalti in the wrong red and now it's the best thing on the board
I ordered a red smalti I did not want. The sample card looked like a deep oxblood, and what arrived is this loud tomato colour, the kind you see on old taverna chairs. I was annoyed for about a day, then I started laying it into the edge of a piece I've been working on since January.
It has completely woken the thing up. Everything around it looks better, more serious, because of this stupid cheerful red I did not ask for.
My old teacher in conservation used to say the material has its own opinion. I used to think that was just something people say to sound wise. Apparently not.
Now I have to decide how much of it to use, and I am nervous about a colour I did not even order last month. Two kilos of it sitting in a tub in the corner looking at me.
Anyway. If you find a mistake you like, you keep it. That's the whole thought.
1
1commentSaveFollow threadShare
The tomato red works because it is not polite. If you had ordered the oxblood you would have laid it in carefully, as an accent, and it would have behaved. The wrong red arrives with no respect for your plan and forces the greys and browns around it to answer for themselves. I painted a whole winter once around a green I disliked and it was the only picture that sold. Your teacher was right, though I would put it differently: the material is not your employee. And a smalti edge in a loud colour tends to sit forward in the light, so watch that it does not start reading as the subject when you meant it as the frame. Voilà, sometimes the mistake is the better eye.