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The little church my mother took me to as a girl is finally getting its proper restoration work done. Twelve hundred years and the place has survived earthquakes, fires, the Ottomans, a war and now a bunch of conservators with lasers and lime mortar. I should be thrilled. I trained in this exact thing. I can't bring myself to walk in and watch. It's not the work itself, I trust the people on it, they're good. It's that I know it at a different scale. I knew that floor when you could see where footsteps had worn the tesserae smooth in the same path for three hundred years. There's something about the cleaned-up version that makes me feel like the church I remember is being erased to save it. My mother would call me a fool and tell me to go help. She's probably right. But the day they take the scaffolding down something is going to end, even though the building will stand another five hundred years. Anyway. If the work looks sterile afterwards, that's on me for not being brave enough to go and get my hands in it.

Got a commission a few months ago to repair and restore this old family photo that was basically falling apart. Water damage, creases, the edges gone gray. I almost said no because I don't do restoration work, I make things. But the woman who brought it in had this look. Her grandmother in the photo. Only copy. So I did it. Carefully, slow, like the whole thing was made of ash. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized the line between repairing and making is fake. You're still just deciding what stays and what goes and what gets to be seen. She picked it up yesterday and cried in my studio. Hugged me. I'm not a hugger but I let it happen. Anyway I've been thinking about that all week. The whole time I've been collecting broken things to make art from, and the one piece I actually fixed mattered more than any of it.

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?

Back in the lean years I took a restoration job that paid a commission, not a flat fee. The contractor was a friend, the project was a Byzantine floor in a small church up near Kilkis, genuinely interesting work, and I was eating rice and beans so I said yes without asking the number that mattered. Eight months on my knees, in and out, matching tesserae that some other hand had set in the 6th century. Lovely job. When it was done he came by with a cheque and it all felt very brotherly until I did the division in my head driving home. €2.10 an hour. I knew the whole time it was cheap. I didn't know it was that cheap. I think some part of me didn't want to do the math because then I'd have to leave, and the work was the only thing keeping me sane in that period. I still take friends-and-family work at a discount sometimes. But I always write down the hourly number before I start, in the margin of the sketch, so I can't pretend later. If it comes out under minimum wage I either raise it or pass. The church floor was worth doing. The price was not.

I'm thinking about the moments that surprised you in a good way with a gallery. For me it was maybe ten years ago, first meeting with a gallerist in Berlin. I brought my usual folder, ready for the standard conversation. She'd read my artist statement. Actually read it. Asked me about a line in it about layering as a form of memory, and I realised she'd thought about it more than I had in years. I didn't get the show. Didn't matter. That conversation changed how I thought about the work. What's a gallery interaction that surprised you, something that restored a bit of faith?

I keep every offcut. Every sliver of smalti too small to set, every chip of marble from a restoration job in 2011, all of it goes in old jam jars on the shelf and everyone tells me it's a sickness. Fair. The shelf is a mess and I can't get to the good tweezers. Today I was setting a small panel, sky over the Thermaic, and I ran out of the blue I'd been hoarding. I sat there annoyed with myself for a while and then I just started pulling the jars down. There's so much blue in there. Twelve years of blues, all slightly different, some matte, some glassy, bits from a fountain mosaic in the old town, bits from a commission I lost money on. I laid them in and the whole thing went alive in a way my tin of new blue never does. The old pieces are duller. The dullness is what makes it look like weather. Anyway. Fifteen years of not throwing things out, and today it paid. I finished the sky before the light went. I'm not saying it's a great sky, I'm saying it's the first one I've made that looks like it's actually over water. If you keep a jar of rubbish, tell me what's in it, I want to feel less alone on this.

A student left it behind three years ago when I still taught the Tuesday group, and it's been sitting on the shelf above the palette table since. The linseed has separated, there's a skin on top like the surface of old milk, and underneath it the paste has gone the colour of an old piano key. Not white. Warm. I know what lead white does. Creminitz wrote about it, everyone wrote about it, it darkens and the world moves on. But this jar is the last of it I will probably ever have. Nobody sells it to a studio painter here now, and I am not going to order it from a restorer's supplier like some kind of criminal. Part of me wants to use it. Not as white, as a warm pale for flesh in shadow, mixed with a touch of terre verte, and let it do whatever it does over ten years. The other part knows I'd be painting something I'll be apologising for in 2035. I put my nose in it this morning, the way you do. Still smells of nothing much. That's the strange part, it doesn't smell like metal or dust, just faintly of oil. So it sits there. I pick it up, I look at it, I put it back. It's become a kind of ornament, which is the worst fate for a material. If anyone paints in lead and has an opinion on whether a three-year-old paste is worth reviving with a bit of fresh oil on the glass, I want to hear it.