The print I've been avoiding for two years, and it only took nine minutes of light
There's a piece of glass I collected from Praia do Carneiro maybe two years ago. Frosted, worn soft at the edges, the kind the Atlantic takes decades to sand down. I have kept it on the shelf with the other shore things and never once put it on paper. Too much of it, I think. The whole summer my father was ill, that glass was in my pocket. Took it out on the sand in August and thought, no, not yet.
This morning I coated a sheet of Fabriano, laid the glass down, weighted the corners with two pebbles, and put it in the sun at 9:40. Nine minutes. Nine. Two years of not-doing it, and the whole thing took nine minutes of ordinary winter light.
It came out like a thing that had been underwater a long time. The frosted part went a pale milky blue where the paper stayed damp. Around the edge, where the seawater dripped, that dark Prussian rim I can never quite plan for.
I don't know why the waiting was so long. Maybe it needed to be a different person holding the paper down. Anyway it is on the line now, drying, and I keep going out to look at it and coming back in.
Small win. But it's the one that has been following me around the house for two years, so it counts double.
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Nine minutes. That's the bit that gets me. Two years of carrying the thing and the actual doing of it takes less time than a pot of tea going cold.
I've a drawer of bits like that. A piece of slate off the Burren, a gull feather gone grey, the odd stone off a beach in Kerry. All of them waiting for the day they're "ready." Sometimes the waiting IS the work, mind. You weren't avoiding it, you were letting it settle into something you could actually put down. Some things you print too early and you can feel it in the sheet, like the paper knows you weren't finished with the thinking yet.
Fair play for laying it down. The pebbles as corner weights is a lovely touch, keeping the shore in the process. That'll hang well.
"Like the paper knows you weren't finished with the thinking yet." Yes. That is it exactly, and I am glad you said it that way, because I had been carrying a little guilt about the two years, as if it were laziness.
An Irish drawer of things, then. The Burren slate and the Kerry stone. I have never been, but I know the kind of grey you mean, the one the weather makes and nothing else does.
You are right that the waiting is the work. But I think the waiting only counts if you are honest about it. Some of the two years was settling. Some of it was just fear, and I know the difference now, looking back at the print. The glass came out soft, almost no edge to it. If I had done it in the first year it would have been a document of a bad summer. Two years and it is just the sea, wearing things down the way it does.
Print the slate. You will feel when the sheet is ready, and if you print it early you will know that too. Either way it will be true, and there is no waste in that.