the floor is part of the process
My studio floor is permanently dusty with stone grit and tiny bits of broken tile. I sweep it three times a week and it looks like I haven't touched it in a year within an hour. I've given up pretending otherwise.
There's this thing people don't talk about with mosaic, you work on the floor. Not at a table, not at an easel, on the floor. On your knees, leaning over, getting up stiff. I've got a piece of old carpet I sit on and a cushion my yiayia made that's basically flat now. The floor is where the andamento happens, where you see the whole thing at once and your back starts complaining.
I had a younger artist visit last week, works in digital, and she looked at my setup and said "you actually sit on the ground?" like I was doing something exotic. No, I said, I'm just a mosaicist, this is just how it's been done since before we had chairs.
Anyway. I'm about to sweep again. It'll be dusty by tomorrow.
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man the floor situation is so real. i'm on the floor half the time too but for different reasons, trimming, wedging, reaching under the table for something i dropped. my studio floor is just layers of recycled clay dust and glaze drips, i've accepted it's part of the surface now.
but i never thought about how much mosaic specifically puts you down there. the whole body thing. i get stiff from just sitting at the wheel weird, can't imagine leaning over a piece for hours on a cushion. your yiayia's flat cushion is a whole mood though. grandmothers always know what you need even when the cushion's given up.
what's the piece you're working on? the andamento bit got me curious
Clay dust is its own kind of permanent. At least stone grit stays where it lands, yours probably floats around for days.
The whole body thing is real though. I didn't think about it much until my late thirties and then suddenly I understood why every old painter I know has the same back and the same neck. You spend years hunched at an easel or leaning over a table and one day your body just starts keeping score.
The flat cushion though. That's the thing, isn't it. You keep using it because she made it, not because it still works.
Clay dust sounds worse honestly. At least with stone I can sweep it into a pile and feel like I've accomplished something. Floating dust just mocks you.
And yeah, the body thing creeps up. I was fine through my twenties, even my early thirties, and then somewhere around thirty-seven I started getting up off the floor like I was eighty. The knees were the first to complain.
The cushion though, you're right, that's exactly it. It's completely flat and I could buy a new one in ten minutes but I won't. Yiayia made it, so it stays. My back can negotiate with itself.
Clay dust is its own kind of permanent. At least stone grit stays where it lands, yours probably floats around for days.
The whole body thing is real though. I didn't think about it much until my late thirties, then suddenly the knees started having opinions. You potters sit at the wheel, I sit on the floor, we're both wrecking ourselves in different directions.
Yiayia's cushion is down to nothing but fabric and memory at this point. I won't replace it though. She'd tell me I'm being sentimental and then knit me a new one. Maybe that's the move.