Up Against The Wall: Part Two

All right, I've gotten to work on the new tile backsplash.  In fact, I've been working on it for a year and a half. The design is way more involved than the last one was, thirty years ago. That's not surprising. I drink less now--that being the only direction my beer consumption could have gone--and I'm not as inclined to half-ass my projects. In fact, I'm tinkering with it even to the extent of painting individual fir needles. I'm tidying up the intersections of colors with an Exact-O knife. In fact, I have, with maturity, become a complete fussypants.

And there's no guarantee that's going to do me any good.

Because here's the thing. After I sent the first backsplash to the kiln, all ten-plus square feet of it, and it came out as well as could be expected, I started painting tiles as Christmas presents. Little things, like trivets. And about half the time they came out just fine, and half the time they Most Certainly Did Not. They came out of the kiln all runny and blurry, like over-nuked leftovers. I'd paint a flicker and it would come out brilliant with all the feather edgings intact, a constellation of spots perfectly arrayed on the belly. Then I'd take the same amount of time and trouble on another tile, and it would come out of the kiln looking like frat barf on Taco Night.

There was no predicting it. In a disturbing parallel to the current state of my cognitive abilities,  the result could be precise and orderly, or it could be all over the place. I asked the kiln owners if they had any insight into this. Not one did. "That's the beauty of ceramics," they'd tell me through rumpled grins, shrugging in their muddy smocks. "You're playing with fire. You never really know what you're going to get!" Ha ha!

Bite me.

And this is the real reason I never finished the backsplash project, thirty years ago. I was terrified at the prospect of spending literally thousands of hours hunched over in my studio, inches from my work, with my glasses off, with Exact-O knife and tiny brush, like some medieval monk, and have the whole thing go straight to hell in a few hours in a kiln. And no one can promise me it won't.

Picture Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. He's been on his scaffold for four years with his head cranked back so far it might snap off at any time, and once he got around to creating God, there He was hanging right over him unnervingly for the whole rest of the project, and poor Mich had to paint chubby little babies over and over again just to get over the willies, and finally he eases off of the scaffolding and stands under his work and he's disoriented and miserable but there's this big ceremony and somebody hands him a bottle and tells him to go ahead and whack a pillar with it, and he doesn't know if it's a bottle of Champagne or a Molotov cocktail because he still doesn't have his neck working properly yet, but everyone's smiling and clapping and he just has to give it a whirl.

So I'm ready to pack my eighty tiles off to the kiln, and I don't know what's going to happen. It could be grand, or it could blow up. Either way, there's going to be a bottle involved.

Up Against The Wall: Part One

Last century, I glazed a bunch of tiles for a backsplash in our new kitchen. My friend Katie set me up with all the proper glazes and instructions. All I needed to do was draw out the design, fill in the glazes as though coloring in a coloring book, and then put two more coats of all the colors on. Then anyone with a kiln could fire them for me.

There are easier ways of going about this. Most of the time, when you see a scene depicted in tile, the artist has painted the scene--once--and then put a clear glaze over the top. It will look like a watercolor. But I wanted the thick, jewelly, luscious version. The deep, yummy, stained-glass version. And that takes three coats. Katie strongly recommended I make test tiles of all the colors so that I would really know what they looked like. So I took the time to paint each glaze--three times--onto test tiles and label them.

Already, this is way out of character for me. I was always full of ideas but had no interest in spending any more time on them than I had to. I used to sew clothes without pinning or ironing anything. They ended up with accidental ruching and off-set, asymmetrical seams that you might now see from a Project Runway contestant, although not from a winning one.

The tile project proved to be a complete pain in the ass. It's one thing to draw in a design and fill it in with a coat of glaze. The precision required to repeat that design exactly with the second and third coats could fry your eyeballs. Glaze is not paint-like. I used a tiny brush. It was like pushing mud around with a bunch of eyelashes.

Also, my design was not that great. I started with Mt. St. Helens erupting on the left, because that's what Mt. St. Helens was busy doing at the time, but I had seven linear feet to fill. That covers a lot of ground, especially when you're using a bunch of eyelashes. So I punted. People like it well enough, but I always see this large, lumpen green hill sprawled across the middle, a hill that represents--well, if there was an artist's statement associated with it, it would be "In this work I hope to demonstrate my sincere desire to get this piece of shit project over with."

The original idea was to continue the backsplash all the way around the kitchen. The trim for the window was installed with small nails that never got hammered in all the way, because tiles were going to be slid under them. I could have soldiered on with the rest of it, but as I recall I had a lot of drinking to accomplish at the time. The nails are still sticking out. Sometimes I hang baggies on them to dry. The wallboard behind the sink is degraded from moisture. I'm used to it; it barely registers.

Then a couple years ago Dave came up to me, and in a mild voice with all the wheedle removed, he said: Now that you've been retired for--gosh!--five years, and we're coming up on the--gosh!--thirtieth anniversary of the original backsplash, do you think you could maybe have a go at finishing that tile work?

He was so nice about it. He's been waiting a long time. I said I would.

Although I really don't like to reward a nag.