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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?

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.

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?

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?