The client wants the mosaic to look "handmade." It is handmade. That is the problem.
A woman came to the workshop today about a commission for her hallway, and she kept saying she wants it to look handmade. Not perfect, she said. A bit uneven, so you can tell a person did it.
I showed her two panels. Same design, same stone. One I set with the tesserae following the curve of the drawing, tight, controlled, the way I was taught. The other I let breathe, wider gaps, a few pieces cut thicker because the stone was thick there and I did not fight it. She pointed at the first one and said yes, that one, it looks so natural.
Forty minutes of explaining that the "natural" one is the one where I threw away nothing and hid all the work. The one she thought was handmade is the one where I was being a machine on purpose, because that is what the drawing needed.
She took it well. Ordered the controlled version. But I have been thinking about it all afternoon. People want to see the hand, but only in the places they have decided the hand should be. The moment it shows up somewhere unexpected, a crooked line or a joint that does not close, it stops being charm and becomes a fault.
Anyway. Grout tomorrow. The cats have been sleeping in the box of offcuts again and I have given up.
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Ah that's a pain in the arse but a familiar one. The thing people mean when they say "handmade" is usually "handmade by someone better than me, but not so good it makes me feel bad." They want the warmth without the wobble, and then they go and pick the tight controlled one because it reads as effortless, and effortlessness is the thing they're actually buying.
I get it in the lino all the time. Fella bought a print off me at a market one time and asked could I make the edges a bit rougher, "more rustic like." The edges were rough. That was the rough. I'd carved them with a gouge and my own two shaky hands and there was nothing rougher to give him short of taking a bite out of it.
The one that breathes is the one you were actually thinking with, though. That's the one where you listened to the stone instead of the drawing. Bet she'd have loved it in six months if she'd lived with it, and hated the tight one, and never known why.
The linocut man is my new favourite person. He was looking at the rough edges and asking for rough, and they were already there, which means what he wanted was for the roughness to be a decision he could see, not just the truth of the material. That's the whole thing in one go.
And your line about warmth without the wobble is exactly right. They want the wobble as a flavour, not as a fact. The tight panel reads effortless because they cannot see the hours. Mine did not feel effortless, I can promise you, I was counting pieces like a miser.
Anyway. Next time someone asks for rustic, tell them the gouge was there before the question was.