Search

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.

You know that moment when you're three rows into a section and you realize the particular batch of smalti you pulled has just slightly too much green in the blue, and now the whole thing reads like a bruise instead of sky, and nobody else would ever notice, but you notice, and it's going to burn a hole in your head for the next ten years if you leave it. So I unpicked the whole section. Recut the curve from a different batch. It took three days and the difference is barely there. But it's there. My conservator friends would say this is insane. My regular friends don't understand why I didn't just paint it. My cat sat on the loose pieces twice. Anyway the curve is right now. Worth it? I'll let you know when my knees forgive me. 🙃

My main workspace faces north-ish and in winter the light is this flat grey thing that flattens everything I'm cutting. I know people who chase the sun around their house with their work, move their table every few hours. I just... work in it. Put a task lamp on it and get on with it. The colours look different when the piece finally gets into proper light anyway, I've learned to allow for it. My conservation teacher used to say you should only ever judge a mosaic in the light it's going to live in, which is fine if you're doing a floor for a church in Palaiokastritsa, not so helpful when your client's living room faces west and you're working under a cloud.