The Image Is Not Where You Left It

I can ruin a perfectly good part of a mosaic by looking at it too closely for too long, and I have done it more than once. I replace one bothersome piece, then the replacement bothers me, and twenty minutes later I have corrected something that disappears as soon as I walk across the room.

At the bench, "Does this tessera look right?" feels like a reasonable question. It is not enough by itself because I also need to ask where it has to look right and what happens to the image when I change my distance from it.

At twelve inches I see glass, edges, gaps, scratches, reflections and individual pieces. Several feet away, many of those distinctions weaken and groups begin doing work that no single tessera can do alone.

Nothing on the mosaic moved, but I did. That matters because we usually judge a work from the same close position where we make it, and that can be the worst place to decide whether a local problem survives into the larger image.

I interfere with that habit on purpose by stepping back, rotating the work, reducing a photograph, removing color or changing the light. If a problem survives several different conditions, I pay attention to it; if it exists only with my nose near the glass, I question whether I am fixing the mosaic or fixing my memory of the mosaic.

Close viewing still matters because mosaic can give us one experience from across a room and another when we walk right up to it. I want both, but I do not ask them to do the same job, and I care more about how those two views work together than I care about perfect individual pieces.