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Kid came to the workshop Tuesday, wants to learn mosaic, great. First thing out of his mouth: why don't you just stick everything with epoxy and skip the grout, save yourself the week. I stared at him for a second. We're in Thessaloniki, the floor under our feet has been sitting there with lime mortar and grout for 1,400 years, still holding. And he wants me to explain to him why I don't use construction adhesive on a panel I'd already be dead before it needed re-grouting. I get it, nobody teaches this stuff anymore, it's not his fault. But I told him to work a whole small piece the old way before he asked me that question again. He did a palm-sized fish, got real quiet around hour three of nipping smalti. There's a reason the Romans didn't have a shortcut, and it's not that they were too dumb to invent silicone. I'm not saying grout is sacred. I'm saying you don't learn a two-thousand-year-old technique by asking how to skip its middle. He's back tomorrow. We'll see.

I have been making mosaic 20 years and today I mixed the grout green. On purpose. It is a small panel of olive branches, 40 by 60, for a woman who lost her husband last spring and asked for something for her kitchen, nothing sad, she said, just something alive. I set the tesserae two weeks ago. Grey grout would have been correct. Grey grout is always correct, it lets the stone speak, I have said this to students like a prayer. But the olives are green smalti and the leaves are green and the background is a warm off white, and every time I looked at it I saw a cold grid pulled over the whole thing. So I sat with a bit of pigment and a yogurt cup for an hour like an idiot, testing on scrap, and then I grouted the real panel green. It looks like light coming through a canopy. I keep going into the studio just to look at it sideways. I have spent half my life learning the rules of this craft from people who were dead before I was born, and the craft is patient, it will wait for you to be ready. Today it felt like the waiting paid out. Twenty years to do a thing wrong on purpose. She collects it Friday. I have not told her. I am a little afraid she wanted grey.

Pulled out a portrait panel I finished last spring, one I shipped to a client in Athens, and she sent me a close-up photo today asking if this was supposed to happen. The deep blue smalti has this white bloom creeped into the edges, right where the grout sits. Efflorescence, I know the word, I've seen it on outdoor work, but this thing has been in a dry apartment for six months. She's not angry, she's asking. But I don't have a good answer and it's eating at me. I used a standard grey grout, cured it properly, sealed it. The theory I've got now is I left the tiles a hair too close together on that section and the grout couldn't seat right, so moisture sat in the joint instead of drying out. I've done this twenty years. Still can't tell whether it's my mix, my joint width, or the stone itself weeping from somewhere I can't see. Anyone else seen smalti bloom like this indoors, or did I mess up the recipe and I should just own it and offer to re-grout on my dime?

Cutting the tesserae for a commission piece, a 60 by 90 panel for a hotel lobby here in Thessaloniki, and I've hit the thing I always hit around the two-thirds mark. To make the setting go faster I opened the gaps between the stones. Not much. A millimetre and a half where I normally keep them tight enough that you lose the line entirely. On the floor it looked fine, even forgiving. Then I got it upright and lit properly and the whole thing went soft. The grout started reading as drawing instead of disaster. Everything I liked about it, the way the surface fights itself, just drained out through those little grey rivers. Restoration work ruined me for this. When I was training we spent a week on a floor fragment from the 5th century and the mortar joints were so fine you could barely get a needle between them. I keep that in my hands. But tight joints cost you time, and time is what a commission is actually buying. So now I'm pulling about forty stones and re-cutting them a bit larger, which is stupid because the piece is already glued down. The andamento is fine. The rhythm is good. It's just the air between things. Anyone else find that the fix that saves you an afternoon is the one that kills the piece?

Pulled a pair of jeans out of the back of the cupboard this morning that I haven't worn since maybe 2019. They've got that faint white bloom around the knees where grout dust settled in and never fully came out, and a small burn hole from when I was sloppy with the angle grinder one afternoon. Honestly they're the best thing I own right now. Every new pair is just cloth until something happens to it. I was telling a student yesterday that the work shows up on you as much as on the piece and she looked at me like I'd said something profound. No love, the profound thing is that your clothes eventually tell the truth about what you do all day and mine say floor, cement, patience. We throw away so much because it's stained or marked and it's usually the marked stuff that has a life worth keeping. Anyway. Wearing them to the studio today and I feel a bit like myself for the first time in a week. Small victories. Throwing a scrap of sea-green smalti in the pocket to keep them honest. 🙂

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. 🙂

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

Small floor, about six square metres, a vine and two birds, smalti and salvaged tile from a demolished house in Ano Poli. I gave them 4,800 and I could see it land wrong in the owner's face, that half-second of relief before he shook my hand. He would have paid 7. I know it because he started talking about the chairs he already ordered, which cost more than my floor. I did the whole job. It took me five weeks, and between the cutting and the setting and two trips back because the grout colour was wrong in daylight, my hourly came out under 11 euros. Less than I paid the boy who carried the sand up. Here is the part people don't want to say out loud. It was not his fault. He said yes to the number I said. The number was mine. I priced the fear of hearing no, not the work. Since then I write the number, then I sit with it one full day. If nobody has fainted, I raise it. Next floor is 8,000 and I already feel sick about saying it. I will say it anyway.

For years my replies to enquiries were a paragraph about materials and then a number. Maybe one in six ever wrote back. Three months ago I changed one thing. Instead of the price I say: I'm setting glass until the 14th, then I'm free, do you want to come and see it on the floor before it's grouted. Nothing else. Twelve enquiries since. Nine of them got in the car. Seven commissions out of that. Same work, same prices, same photos on the page. I think people don't actually want a mosaic. They want to know what they're getting before they hand over 3,000 euros to a stranger with a hammer. A number in a message doesn't answer that. Standing over it in bad light in my workshop does. Two of them signed before they'd seen the whole thing, just the corner where the smalti catches. What annoys me is how obvious it is and how long it took me. I was treating a message like a quote, when it's really the first five minutes of a long job. It has made my week lumpier though. I'm a person again on Thursdays instead of a form. Some days I'd rather just cut stone and be nobody.

Ran a two-day smalti workshop in a borrowed space last month. Priced it at €450, which felt fair for sixteen hours and materials, and I spent weeks anxious about it being too much. Nine signed up. Fine. But the four who filled in the form and then vanished before paying are the interesting part. Two of them I know, they are not broke. One wrote back that she assumed the price included tools she could keep. It did not, and I never said it did, but she read the page and made that up on her own. So my whole booking page is now wrong. It doesn't say what you get, it says what it costs and hopes you'll guess the rest. I don't think the answer is discounting. I think the answer is that I described the workshop like a hotel describes a room, and people filled the gaps with whatever they wanted. Next one I'm listing exactly what's in the box, including the tesserae you take home, and I'm going to say out loud that no, I will not teach you to grout a shower. Third person asked about that. Anyway. Nine people set real stone for two days and one of them, a retired dentist, cut the cleanest andamento I've seen from a beginner in years. So the money part was annoying and the work part was good.

I've been waking up at 6 for the past week just to paint the same corner of my kitchen counter. The lime slice from last night, the steel tumbler from morning chai, the way the sun hits the grout between the tiles. It lasts maybe forty minutes and then it's gone, and I know it's ridiculous because I could just take a photo and paint it later. But it's not the same. There's something about catching it while it's happening, while the light is actually moving across the surface. I think this is my current obsession, I can only paint things in the moment they exist. If I photograph them and come back later, the feeling is gone. The urgency is gone. And the painting comes out flat. Anyone else have a weird time-of-day thing they can't let go of? Or am I the only one waking up unreasonably early for a lime slice and a steel glass 🙂

I spent yesterday cutting back old grout on a piece I'm reworking and I swear I'm still finding dust in places I didn't know I had. Inside my watch. In the crease of my notebook. My cats are sneezing. I washed my hair twice and there's still a gritty feeling when I run my fingers through it. It's the fine stuff too, not the chunks, that almost-powder that floats for hours and settles on everything three rooms away. I gave up and ate dinner over the sink because the whole kitchen felt like a construction site anyway. Does anyone else just surrender to it? Or do you have some system I haven't figured out in fifteen years of doing this?

A woman came to the workshop today about a commission for her hallway, and she kept saying she wants it to look handmade. Not perfect, she said. A bit uneven, so you can tell a person did it. I showed her two panels. Same design, same stone. One I set with the tesserae following the curve of the drawing, tight, controlled, the way I was taught. The other I let breathe, wider gaps, a few pieces cut thicker because the stone was thick there and I did not fight it. She pointed at the first one and said yes, that one, it looks so natural. Forty minutes of explaining that the "natural" one is the one where I threw away nothing and hid all the work. The one she thought was handmade is the one where I was being a machine on purpose, because that is what the drawing needed. She took it well. Ordered the controlled version. But I have been thinking about it all afternoon. People want to see the hand, but only in the places they have decided the hand should be. The moment it shows up somewhere unexpected, a crooked line or a joint that does not close, it stops being charm and becomes a fault. Anyway. Grout tomorrow. The cats have been sleeping in the box of offcuts again and I have given up.

Someone pulled out a 1960s bathroom three streets from me and I said yes to the tile before I saw it. Forty kilos, mostly that pale sea-green that was everywhere in this city in the sixties, plus some terracotta that's gone soft and crumbly at the edges from decades of damp. The good half cuts like a dream. Thin, even, that green turns almost grey when it's wet and comes back green when it dries, beautiful for water. The bad half is dust. I spent two hours this morning with a hammer and a hardie and got maybe a coffee cup of usable tesserae out of it, and a lungful of old grout. My problem is I can't throw it out. It came off a wall in my own neighbourhood. Somebody's grandmother picked that colour. And I know exactly what will happen, it'll sit in the crate under the bench for three years and I'll move it twice and finally use it in something small just to be rid of it. Anyway. That's the state of the studio today. Crates everywhere, dust on everything, one cat sleeping in the box of terracotta which she has decided is hers.

A woman wants a 4 metre mosaic for a hotel lobby in Halkidiki. Deposit was good money, more than I made in the whole of 2013. She has a Pinterest board. She sent it twice. I went to see the space on Monday. Grey marble everywhere, that cold beige lighting, and she wants a "warm, organic, hand-made feeling" in smalti. Smalti in a lobby with no daylight is money thrown into a hole. By year two it reads flat and dead and my name is on it. So I said no. Politely, with an actual reason, and offered her a smaller stone piece for the reception wall instead. Half the money. She hasn't replied. I sat on the balcony after the call with a coffee going cold feeling like an idiot, and then around an hour later something in my chest just let go. Fifteen years I've been taking things I knew were wrong because the month needed paying. I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather grout a bathroom floor. Also my left thumbnail is black again from a bad hammer strike. Unrelated. Or maybe not.

I quoted a 2m x 1.5m floor commission for €2,800 last spring. Client loved it, paid in two installments, no drama. Then I actually sat down and counted the hours after delivery. Between the cartoon, cutting and fitting the smalti, sourcing the stone, grouting, and two site visits, I was at 180 hours. That's €15.50 an hour before you subtract materials, which ran me about €400. So closer to €13 an hour for a piece that'll be walked on for decades. The killer is I couldn't have done it faster. That's the honest part nobody wants to say out loud. The work is the work. You can't rush setting a thousand tesserae and have it hold up in a floor. I keep going back and forth on whether to raise my rate for the next one and risk losing the commission, or stay where I am because at least the work comes in. My therapist friend says I should raise it. The landlord says I should raise it. My hands say they'd like to not be ruined by sixty for €13 an hour. Anyone here actually broken through on the price and kept the clients, or is this just what it is for hand-work?

So I'm at this group show, standing maybe a meter from a piece of mine, and this guy walks up to the person next to him and starts explaining how mosaic is done. "They take the stones, see, and they grind them down to fit, and then they glue them onto a backing, it's very time-consuming." He's right next to me. I'm wearing the same jacket I was wearing when I was cutting that smalti at 11pm two nights before. Still have grout under my nails. And he's explaining it to someone like I'm not there, like the person who made it couldn't possibly be in the room. I said "it's actually easier than it looks" and walked away. Couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or toss a handful of tesserae at his head. So I just went and found the wine. Does this happen to anyone else or is there a sign on my forehead that says "please explain my own job to me"?

For about 45 minutes between 3 and 4 this time of year, there's a stripe of sun that comes through the window and lands right on the piece I'm working on. Not the whole thing, just one corner, one patch of tesserae. And I've started timing my grout mixing around it because if I'm still cutting when that light hits, I just stop and watch it for a bit before I do anything else. It's stupid because the light doesn't change the work. But the smalti lights up from the inside in a way that reminds me why I do this in the first place. Like oh yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Anyone else have a weird little ritual that's really just an excuse to pause for a minute?