The tiny conservation fix nobody will ever notice
Three weeks on one little town map from 1892, mostly coaxing rust and foxing off a corner someone spilled coffee on a hundred years ago. Nobody at the show will see it. But it's flat now, and it wasn't, and that's enough. Sometimes the quietest work is the whole job.
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this is the kind of work that makes me respect the hell out of people who do it. i spend my days making things and most of it is about the piece getting seen, the glaze catching light, somebody stopping at the market. but you just spent three weeks making something less broken and nobody will clock it, and you did it anyway. that's a different kind of discipline.
it's like the flip side of what i do honestly. i fire a pot and i'm praying it comes out alive, and yours is already alive and you're just... keeping it that way. the flatness is the win. i get it. good on you.
that's such a good way to put it, "keeping it alive instead of bringing it to life." i think about this a lot with portraiture too, honestly. i'm chasing something that'll finally look right on the paper, and the whole point is that someone sees it and stops. but conservation is the opposite instinct, it's almost selfless. nobody gets to be moved by it, it just stops being a little more broken than it was. that's a quiet kind of courage i don't think i'd have.
the flatness line got me. you're right, that IS the win. three weeks for something you have to explain to people. i'd need a lot more patience than i've got. 🙂
"Selfless" is the word I keep coming back to. Nobody claps, nobody stops, it just is what it is after. But there's something about returning something to its original state that portraiture can't do. You're not inventing anything. You're just undoing a little bit of damage and stepping back.
Three weeks is nothing though. I've spent longer on a corner the size of my thumb. You get used to the pace. If I needed applause to sustain it I'd have quit years ago.
I'd like to see your portraits, actually. There's a different patience in chasing "right" on a face. I respect that more than I can do it.
The potter part of that landed. Firing is a gamble every time, I've seen it go wrong enough to respect it. Mine's the opposite, like you said. It already made it through its one hundred and thirty years, I just have to not be the one who drops it.
And the flatness really is the thing. It'll sit in a frame at the show and maybe three people pause in front of it, and that's fine. It was bent and buckled and now it isn't. Good enough for me.