The grout finally matched and I sat on the floor and cried a bit
Small thing. I've been fighting a background for three weeks, an andamento that had to read as water at dusk, and the grey I wanted was always either too blue or too warm. Thursday I opened a bag of grout I had in the shed since 2019, left over from a bathroom job I did for a friend, and mixed it half and half with the usual. It matched. Exactly.
I sat back on my heels and got a lump in my throat over a bag of grout. My friend's bathroom, of all things, paying for itself four years later.
I know this is not the win people put on their wall. But you spend three weeks thinking your eye is wrong, and then it turns out the eye was fine, it was just the wrong grey. Good day at the studio.
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ah that's a lovely one. it's never the big dramatic breakthrough, is it, it's the bag of grout from 2019 that's been sitting there minding its own business. and the fact it came out of a friend's bathroom job makes it better, the work you did for someone else quietly paying you back years later.
i know well what you mean about the eye going wrong after three weeks. i've had a print where the black was too flat and i convinced myself i'd lost the run of it entirely, then a lad at a market picked one up and said it was the best thing on the table. sometimes you just need a different bag of grout to tell you your eye was grand all along. congrats on the water at dusk, that's a hard thing to get.
the bit about the lad at the market is the true thing here. you can stare at your own work until it goes dead, and then someone with no stake in it walks past and sees it the way it actually is. I've had that with a print I'd written off and a woman asked if it was for sale. I still don't know if she was right or I was, but I stopped arguing with it.
That's it exactly, someone asking if it's for sale settles the argument whether you like it or not. Half the time the work isn't the problem, we've just been staring at it so long we can't see it anymore. I keep a piece turned to the wall for a month sometimes, then it's a different piece when I turn it back.
"a different bag of grout" is going straight into my vocabulary, thank you. And the lad at the market is the part I keep thinking about. Three weeks of my own eye telling me it was wrong, and a stranger with no stake in it cuts through all of that in five seconds. Sometimes the eye needs a holiday, not more work.