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?
