Spent a day filling cracks in a plinth nobody will ever see
Eight hours with epoxy and stone dust filling hairline cracks in the back of a plinth that sits against a wall. Nobody's ever going to look at it. Client won't know. But I know, and I couldn't leave it rough.
That's the thing I can't translate to anyone who only sees the work online. The camera catches the front. The part that took three days is invisible. I post a finished piece and people say "clean work" and I want to tell them yeah, it's clean because I spent Tuesday afternoon with my face six inches from the back edge of a thing no one will touch.
Fabrication teaches you this. You don't get to skip the hidden side just because no one checks. The work is the work whether it's photographed or not.
I don't know how to say that in a caption. So I'll say it here instead.
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This is the thing people outside the handwork do not understand. In Mithila painting we have no plinth but we have the same hidden part. The border lines, the fine hatchwork that only shows if you hold the paper close to light, the fixing of a pigment layer that will never be noticed by a viewer standing across the room. But the older women who taught me, they could see it. They would run a finger over the back of the paper even, checking that the colour had soaked right through.
I think there is a dignity in this. The work that no one will credit you for is the work that proves you are doing it for the thing itself and not for the praise. My mother used to say, before you paint the face of the goddess you paint the ground she stands on, and if that ground is not true the face will not hold. She never saw a camera in her life. But every good piece she made, the unseen part was done with the same care as the seen.
You finish knowing. That is enough, sometimes. The client never knows and that is actually fine. I have made many paintings where the collector sees only the finished thing and I know all the days it took. That knowledge is mine. I think you also have that knowledge now, and it is worth more than their comment. 🙏
The finger check. That's the exact thing. I spent years grinding my own pigments before I went to cold wax, and there was a moment in the studio of the man I apprenticed under where he'd take the palette knife and scrape a sliver off the edge of the canvas to see if the paint had bitten. Not the centre. The edge, where the frame would cover it. He never explained why. You just absorbed that this was the standard.
What you said about the older women teaching you, that's the part that stays. The discipline gets handed over whether you asked for it or not, and then you can't unsee the rough parts. You could go back and fill that plinth rough and no one would ever catch you. But you wouldn't sleep. That's not virtue, I think. That's just what the training did to you.
The camera is honestly a kind of lie we all participate in. It flattens the three days into a surface. But I keep thinking, the person who knows is you. And maybe that's enough, or maybe it has to be, because no one else ever will.
The edge check. Yeah. He knew if the center was sloppy someone might catch it, but the edge was where you found out if the person actually cared or was just performing. That's the whole lesson in one gesture. Nobody ever had to say it out loud.
The pigment grinding, that's the other side of the same thing. You can't fake the patience for that. You either grind it because it has to be done, or you don't. There's no shortcut that fools anyone who's been in the room.
You're right that it gets handed over whether you asked or not. I apprenticed under a man who barely spoke to me for the first year. Every lesson came through watching him do something no one would ever see and knowing I'd better be doing the same. That's how it travels.
That finger-over-the-back-of-the-paper check is the whole thing. Nobody does that unless they were taught by somebody who cared more about the work than about being seen doing it.
The pigment soaking through is exactly it. You can't fake that. That's the difference between painting something and building it, and the old women could tell the moment they touched it. I respect that. That's a real standard.
Mithila painting, I don't know much about it. But I know what it costs to do a thing properly when there's no audience for it. Sounds like we were both taught by the same kind of people, just different languages.