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There's a cafe two streets from my apartment, been there forty years, looks like nobody touched the decor since 1992. I go there sometimes when I need to get out of the studio but don't want to go far. Last month I noticed the corner of a rug was lifting near the counter, and underneath there's clearly a mosaic floor. Not a good one, late Byzantine, provincial work, big tesserae, crude faces, but unmistakable. I asked the owner. She said "yeah, we put the rug over it because customers said it was ugly." I'm not making this up. A thousand-year-old floor and people found it offensive to their frappes. I told her what it was and she shrugged. Said I could lift the rug if I wanted, she doesn't care. So now I go once a week and uncover a bit more, drink my coffee, stare at this thing that's survived empires and earthquakes and is now being protected from criticism by a machine-woven rug from IKEA. Anyway. If anyone needs me I'll be on my knees with a soft brush and a very patient waiter.🙂

The little church my mother took me to as a girl is finally getting its proper restoration work done. Twelve hundred years and the place has survived earthquakes, fires, the Ottomans, a war and now a bunch of conservators with lasers and lime mortar. I should be thrilled. I trained in this exact thing. I can't bring myself to walk in and watch. It's not the work itself, I trust the people on it, they're good. It's that I know it at a different scale. I knew that floor when you could see where footsteps had worn the tesserae smooth in the same path for three hundred years. There's something about the cleaned-up version that makes me feel like the church I remember is being erased to save it. My mother would call me a fool and tell me to go help. She's probably right. But the day they take the scaffolding down something is going to end, even though the building will stand another five hundred years. Anyway. If the work looks sterile afterwards, that's on me for not being brave enough to go and get my hands in it.

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

A gallery once asked me to make my mosaics "less Greek." I thought they meant the motifs, but no, they wanted me to take the whole thing more abstract because Byzantine references were "too regional for the market." I said no, obviously, and it ended fine, but I've never forgotten it. Made me think about how much of ourselves we're expected to sand off for a white wall. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? The request that made you stop and go wait, what?

Back in the lean years I took a restoration job that paid a commission, not a flat fee. The contractor was a friend, the project was a Byzantine floor in a small church up near Kilkis, genuinely interesting work, and I was eating rice and beans so I said yes without asking the number that mattered. Eight months on my knees, in and out, matching tesserae that some other hand had set in the 6th century. Lovely job. When it was done he came by with a cheque and it all felt very brotherly until I did the division in my head driving home. €2.10 an hour. I knew the whole time it was cheap. I didn't know it was that cheap. I think some part of me didn't want to do the math because then I'd have to leave, and the work was the only thing keeping me sane in that period. I still take friends-and-family work at a discount sometimes. But I always write down the hourly number before I start, in the margin of the sketch, so I can't pretend later. If it comes out under minimum wage I either raise it or pass. The church floor was worth doing. The price was not.

Finished a big piece today, got it photographed, sent it off. Felt good for about four hours. Then I'm telling this woman at the framer's what I do and she looks at a photo and goes, "oh, the gaps, did you run out of grout?" No. They're deliberate, they're part of the drawing, the negative space is doing half the work. But I just said "no, it's a choice" and smiled and paid for my frame. It's the ones who think they're being kind that get me. Nobody walks up to a painter and asks if the brushstrokes were a mistake. But mosaic invites it somehow, because people assume the chaos came first and the order was a struggle that maybe failed. I've been cutting and setting stone by hand for twenty years and I still said "it's a choice" instead of what I actually wanted to say, which was "the gaps are the point, stare at a Byzantine floor sometime." I know I should let it slide. I'm still annoyed at myself for the soft answer more than at her. No question, just needed that said out loud where someone might get it. 🙂

Client commissioned a big piece for her new office. Paid fully upfront, lovely woman. Then she sent me a Pinterest board full of those mass-produced hexagonal thingies you buy in a box and sticks on the wall like stickers. And she said it, she actually said it, "can you make it more Instagrammable?" I laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one. She looked shocked and then she laughed too, so I think we're fine. I explained that a Byzantine-style smalti panel takes me about three weeks on the floor, and that the whole point is you can't photograph it properly anyway. The glass catches the light different every hour, the tesserae sit slightly uneven so it shimmers, it's a thing you stand in front of. Anyway she walked away with a piece based on a local old map of the city instead of her Pinterest board, and I think she's happier for it. This whole "content is king, work for the algorithm" thing, I get it, I sell work too. But there's something sad about shaping what you make around a photo of it. The work outlives the post. That's the whole game.

Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong. Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros. I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂