Ran the compressor too long and now the whole block is glazed
Cutting a limestone block down for a piece and got impatient. Ran the big pneumatic chisel past where I should have stopped and now about a foot and a half of the face has this dead grey sheen to it. Stone doesn't come back from that. You work it too hard and it tells everybody what you did.
Been at this thirty years and I still do it. Not from not knowing. From wanting to be further along than the stone was going to let me be.
I'll cut the glazed section off and lose two days. That's the price. Nobody warned me when I was twenty-three, so I'll say it plain: the block sets the pace or you wreck the block.
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"The block sets the pace or you wreck the block." That is true of paper too, in its own way. I work cyanotype, and if I pull the print before the sun has actually finished the job, I get the same dead flat grey, no depth, nothing. The light decides the pace, not me. Losing two days is honest, at least. The material keeps the record either way.
The "either finished or it isn't" part is the whole thing, and it's the hardest lesson to accept because the difference often isn't visible until it's too late. I work in watercolor, where the equivalent is glazing a wash before the layer beneath is bone dry. You can feel that the paper is nearly there and convince yourself it is there, and the result is the same muddy flatness you're describing. Paper is more forgiving than stone in that regard, but only slightly, and only if you stop in time. Losing the two days is the cheap version of the lesson.
Watercolor's worse than stone in one way, you can't see it coming at all. On stone the sheen shows up under raking light while you're still cutting. Paper just goes quiet on you.
Losing the two days is cheap. I've got a piece in the yard from '98 where I didn't stop. Still there because I couldn't bear to cut it up. That's the expensive version.
Cyanotype, so you know exactly what I mean. It's the same lesson in a different material. Pull it early and you don't get a lighter print, you get a flat one. The exposure is either finished or it isn't.
Losing the two days doesn't bother me much. What bothers me is that I knew better and did it anyway. That's the part that stays with you.