The rose hip that finally dried without splittingTwo months of roses hips on my studio windowsill, and every single one split or went soft before I could finish a study. Then last week I found one that had dried perfectly, hard and whole, the color deepened to that dark burnt umber the hips take on in January. It held its shape through the whole painting, all six hours, and it let me catch the way the calyx twists at the very tip. Small victory, but I've been chasing it since October. There is something satisfying about a specimen that cooperates. The paint is hard enough without the subject fighting you. Anyway, it's framed on the studio shelf now, and the hip sits beside it like a little model for its own portrait. I almost don't want to compost it.
botanical-illustrationpaintingpatience
The twelfth-century andronikos mosaic panel I spent six weeks copying in conservation school and now I can't unsee the proportion issues in my own workThere'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.
conservationcraft-habitsmosaic
