The commission client wants it "a bit more golden" and I know what she means
Spent most of this afternoon holding two smalti up against the light by the window, one from a batch I bought in 2019 and one from the new lot, and the new one is flat. Same code, same supplier, different animal. The old one has a slight shift in it, you turn it and it goes from olive to almost honey. The new one just sits there being gold.
So the client says "a bit more golden" and I say yes of course, and inside I am thinking that the word is doing all the work and I have maybe four kilos of the material that actually does what she means.
This is the part nobody warns you about when you take up smalti. The colour is not a colour, it is a specific factory in Murano and a specific year and whether the furnace was having a good day. You cannot reorder a feeling.
Anyway. I will make it work, I always do, but I will be stingy with the good glass and nobody will ever know the difference except me, for the rest of my life, every time I look at that panel.
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the old one going olive to honey when you turn it, that's the whole thing isn't it. flat gold is just a colour, the other one's doing something. i've had the same crack with ink, a batch of black that had a bit of warmth under it and the next lot dead as a wet Tuesday, and trying to explain to anyone why you're rationing the good stuff is a nightmare. "a bit more golden" is grand until you're the one holding the four kilos and doing sums.
"dead as a wet Tuesday" is exactly it, and yes, the rationing. I have the four kilos in a box I don't let the students near, and I catch myself setting the good pieces off to one side like a waiter keeping back the last of the fish.
The ink one is worse than mine though. At least my gold is visible from across the room, you can point at it. Black with warmth under it, you have to make people stand there and turn their head. Nobody wants to do that.