Search

Some guy shows up at the studio today with a chunk of marble he bought online. Says he's been "sculpting" for six months. Wants me to look at a crack running through the middle of it and tell him how to fill it so you can't see it. I told him you can't hide a crack in stone. You work with it or you start over. He says no, I saw a video where they use epoxy and marble dust and you can't even tell. I asked him what he's making. He says he hasn't decided yet, he just liked the stone. Six months. Doesn't know what he's making. But he's worried about covering a crack with epoxy. I told him to use the epoxy. What do I care. He'll figure it out in another six months when it fails and he's got a yellow line through his piece.

Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

My daughter set up my Instagram because she got tired of hearing me complain that nobody knew my work. That was two years ago. I have 4,000 followers now and I still don't fully get it. Here's what I've learned. A video of me cutting a weld or roughing out a stone gets ten times the engagement of a finished piece. Every time. The half-finished is interesting, the finished is just another picture. People don't want the result, they want to watch it happen. I used to fight it because it felt like giving away the process. Now I figure there's no real harm. Nobody is going to copy the work from a thirty second clip. And the people who stick around because they liked watching a chunk of marble become something, those are the ones who actually buy. Still feels like a dog doing tricks. But it works better than what I was doing, which was nothing.

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.

Kept it in the bottom of my toolbox like I was going to fix it. You don't fix a chisel that splits at the tang. I knew that. But I'd had it since my apprenticeship -- a Pferd 20mm, had the right weight in the hand. Used it on a chunk of Vermont marble back in 2022 and felt it go wrong before I saw it. Put it in the drawer anyway. Tossed it this morning. Felt stupid about it. But the toolbox is lighter and I'm not going to grab the wrong tool out of habit anymore. That's the thing about holding onto broken tools -- you reach for them without thinking and then you're standing there with something that doesn't work and you've lost the rhythm.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.

It's so cold in the shop right now the marble feels different under the chisel. Stiff. Holds the cut too long and then lets go all at once. I've worked stone in this kind of cold plenty of times, you just go slower or you bust it. But my hands are 61. They don't warm up like they used to. Twenty minutes in and the fingers are telling me things I don't want to hear. Dragged a propane heater out this morning and it's doing just about nothing against a concrete floor and a tin roof. I keep my good chisels in the house this week like they're houseplants. Nobody warns you that the cold part of the work gets harder than the heavy part. I can still move a two hundred pound block around, but I can't keep my own hands above fifty degrees. That's the trade, I guess. The strength stays longer than the circulation.

My mother's mantel clock has lived in the studio for six years now. Nice piece, brass and marble, keeps perfect time. And I cannot work with it audible. The ticking pulls me out of the glaze layer and into counting. I finally took the pendulum off and stuffed a rag in the back just so I could have the thing on the shelf without losing my head. It's beautiful and it's useless to me as a timekeeper in here, which feels like some kind of metaphor I don't need to chase. The hours in this room are not measured the same way. You know when the light changes, when your knees complain, when the paint stops behaving. That's the clock that matters. The other one just makes you anxious.

okay so I have this little palette that I use exclusively for scraping off, like when I've mixed too much of something and I don't want to waste it down the sink, I scrape it onto this sad little ceramic dish. And I've been doing this for maybe a year and a half now? It's just layer after layer of dried gouache and watercolor crust, all these colors smooshed together into this weird marbled sediment thing. I keep thinking I should clean it off and start fresh but honestly it's kind of beautiful?? It's like a geology core sample of every painting I've done since I went full-time. I scraped a warm grey off it today and it had these tiny veins of ultramarine running through it from something I painted in like March and I just sat there staring at it for a solid minute. My partner thinks I'm insane for keeping it but they also touched it once and said "oh that's actually kind of pretty" so. I'm keeping it.