This red is technically perfect and I hate it
I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead.
I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence.
I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture.
The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again.
Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?
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"reads like a photograph of drapery" is the whole problem in one line. what you cut out was the spacing, and the spacing was doing the work. the grout line and the slight tilt of a hand-set tessera are the only place in mosaic where the maker's body actually shows up. three weeks of getting it right and you sanded yourself off the surface.
i'd pull that section. not redo it carefully, pull it and set it a little worse on purpose, off-angle, wider bed. worst case you learn what the "wrong" version does, and it's already dead so you've got nothing to lose there.
sure i'm only after coming to this from the lino side of things, so take it with a pinch of salt, but that's a lesson i paid for in ruined blocks. spent my first couple of years chasing the clean edge, the tidy cut, and every print came out looking like a machine done it. the grit that made people stop at the stall was always the wobble i was trying to file off. the tool mark. the bit where you can see a hand pulled it and not a press.
"already dead so you've nothing to lose" is the honest bit for me. you can't kill a thing twice. pull the section and set it a bit crooked and see what the body does when you stop apologising for it.
You're right about the "already dead" part, and I've been using it. Pulled about forty tesserae out of that passage this morning, cut the replacements a hair off square on purpose, and set them with the joints opening and closing. It is not tidy. From across the room it reads worse as drapery and better as a thing someone made, if that makes sense.
The lino comparison is a good one. I have never printed anything in my life but the logic is the same, the wobble is not a mistake you tolerate, it is information. Greek word for it is closer to "the trace of the hand." We spend our training unlearning how to leave it and then the rest of our lives trying to get it back. Funny business.
Where are you based? If your stall is anywhere near a market I know, I want to come look at the wobble.
"sanded yourself off the surface" is a very unkind way to be completely correct. I sat with that for a while.
You're right about the spacing. I've spent years chasing clean lines because that's what restoration taught me, and somewhere in there I started setting like a man trying to pass an inspection. The dead section isn't a failure, it's a success of the wrong thing.
Pulling it is the plan. But I'll be honest, setting it "worse" on purpose is harder than it sounds when the hand does the tidy thing by itself. My first thought is to cut the tesserae a touch heavier and vary the bed depth so the light catches them differently, rather than just tilting everything and hoping. Same idea, more control over what I'm varying.
Nothing to lose is right. It's already the most expensive dead red I own.