The taper in the tiles

Still working away on that Baños piece. The roofs specifically. After fusing a bunch of the tiles I had a revelation. There was something not right about those tiles. They didn't seem to lay down the way they should and I kept seeing stacks of thread spools instead of tiles.

Then it struck me that those tiles taper ever so slightly so that one end is narrower than the other. That allows them to overlap each other. So I peeled them off (I never fuse things very securely until I am finished, for this very reason) and trimmed each tile so that it tapers a bit. Do you see the difference?

It is a small thing, but it made a big difference to my eye. I read that originally those roof tiles were made by hand and shaped by rolling out a slab of clay that the maker shaped by forming it over his own upper leg, giving it just the right curve and taper.

I know by telling you this I am exposing that "fussy" side of my art-making that makes me feel a little defensive. I have artist friends who give me a hard time about needing to make things "perfect" and precise. The work I do is not of the very free-flowing and spontaneous sort of abstraction that a lot of fabric art tends to be.  But it is what it is and I really don't go to great lengths to be perfectly, precisely accurate. I love seeing that other kind of work, but it isn't what I was cut out to do. I used to worry about that. Now I don't. The kind of representative things that I make have a lot of abstraction in them and I am always a little puzzled by the observations of others that talk about precision. You can see in both of those closeups that the tiles are not precise at all. Making those tiles taper a bit actually made them less precise, but for me it made them more "right". It always bothers me, in both representational and very abstract art when planes and angles feel wrong. When lines are awkward. When composition is out of whack. It is all the same, whether meant to look like something real or not, it is composition, planes, lines, balance, color. The plane of that roof didn't tilt in the right direction until I tapered the tiles. I remember a college professor saying that even in the most non-representational work the laws of physics and gravity and nature still provide the sense of order that helps you make sense of what you see. I have a pet irritant in artwork—trees that taper in the wrong direction. I wonder, has this artist never noticed that tree trunks are larger at the bottom and smaller at the top? Or maybe it's irrelevant to them and maybe I am fussy. That really isn't something I want to be.