Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: From Brass to Silver

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aluminum leaf, decorative painting, faux finish, gilding, glazing, interior design, metal leafing, silver leaf

An interior designer recently asked me to gild a mirror frame. The frame was brass, and he wanted a silver leafed frame instead. I suggested switching the leaf to aluminum because silver tarnishes in unpredictable ways, even after varnishing. The frame would look like silver leaf, without the headaches. He agreed, and we were good to go.

Here’s the original mirror frame. The mirror was 33 inches high and 22 inches wide (84 cm x 56 cm). My cat, Little Roo, couldn’t resist investigating.

Step One: The Prep
In any painting or gilding project, prep is your friend. The better your prep, the less clean up you’ll have to do when you’re done, and the quicker the job will go. I taped off the mirror next to the frame using blue low-tack painter’s tape to protect it. The mirror was raised up on four paint cans to bring it off the table, which allowed access to the sides of the frame. The table was protected with a drop cloth.

Step Two: The Size
Gilding begins with sizing. Size is an oil- or water-based type of glue specifically made for gilding. In this case, I used slow-set oil size, which levels out as it dries so you don’t see brush marks. Gilding is usually done over a painted surface. I crossed my fingers that the size would stick to the brass. Luckily, it did.

I mixed the size about 5:1 with mineral spirits. This sped up the drying time of the size, which is usually about 10 hours. Thinned out, it dried to the correct tack in about an hour. I applied it with a half-inch wide natural bristle brush, sizing 5-inch sections at a time, gently blended the size out to the edges and brushed back and forth a few times to blend the last section into the next. I wanted an even coat; no pooling, no missed spots. The size is colorless, so it’s hard to see where it is. It pays to work slowly and to use a light’s reflection to see where you’ve been. Below, you can’t tell what has been sized and what hasn’t.

Step Three: The Tack
The size has to dry to a specific tackiness before gilding can begin. Too wet and the metal leaf won’t dry; too dry and the metal leaf won’t stick. The correct tack is found at the squeak: if you gently drag one of your knuckles along the surface, a gentle squeak will be heard. Too wet and your knuckle gets stuck and mars the surface; too dry and there’s no squeak, although there’s a window of at least an hour when the squeak is right. So don’t go out and start running errands! Stand by, set a timer and wait for the squeak.

Step Four: The Gilding
Luckily, I had a leftover roll of aluminum leaf to work with, which saved the hassle of buying a small amount of leaf. I like to work with rolls, which have individual sheets of leaf laid next to one another, overlapping by 1/8 inch. On the frame, it will look like each leaf has been applied individually, but by using the roll, the process is speeded up. I gilded one side of the frame at a time, cutting the appropriate length of leaf off the roll.

To apply  the leaf, I used a soft brush to gently push it to the surface and stuck it down through the backing paper. It’s important to remember that the oil size below is still wet, and therefore the leaf is now wet and is delicate, so it has to be treated gently. Also, try to avoid touching the leaf; you may leave finger prints. Any cracks or missed spots were filled with little pieces of leaf until the surface was completely covered. Gilding makes a real mess; tiny specks of leaf drift to every corner of the room.

Step Five: The Patch
Somehow, I managed to miss a spot when sizing. No problem, I just applied more size, let it dry for an hour, did the squeak test and applied more leaf.

Step Six: The General Cleanup
Since the surface was delicate, only a general clean up could take place. I removed  the big hanging pieces of leaf and gently brushed off the bigger flakes.

No pressure and no rough handling at this point. The size has to dry overnight before the leaf can be thoroughly cleaned. There’s still a lot of extra leaf on the frame.

Step Seven: The Final Cleanup
The frame has dried overnight and it’s time for the real cleaning. Using soft cheesecloth and a soft brush, I wiped and brushed the surface until all of the remaining bits and pieces of leaf fell away.

Although the leaf was now properly adhered, I didn’t want to scratch it, so I still handled everything with care. Once I was done, I took off the tape and cleaned up the inner edge, then taped the mirror again for glazing.

Step Eight: The Glaze
The designer wanted a soft aging glaze to cut down the brightness of the aluminum, which is glaringly reflective when fresh, but he didn’t want the frame to look dirty. I mixed up a glaze using Windsor & Newton’s Liquin Original, which is an oil medium and the only medium I’ve found that is transparent enough to use as a giaze over gilding. I added in a blob of raw umber from a bottle of universal tint, mixed it up and the glazing began.

The color looked quite dark when mixed, but once applied and manipulated, it was a sheer, light wash of color. I brushed it on with a one-inch wide chip brush, then pounced the surface with cheesecloth, taking most of the glaze off again. Below, the vertical edge is glazed while the horizontal one isn’t. You can see the warmth added by glazing in this color. The glaze gave depth to the frame’s surface without calling attention to itself and reduced the aluminum’s glare.

Step Nine: The Final Product
The mirror dried overnight again, the tape came off, and voila! A new frame. Total time  for the whole process was about six hours. With the glaze, the look of the leaf became softer and it seemed to glow instead of shine.

Here’s a comparison of the original brass, before glazing, and after glazing. I love these jobs! it’s such fun to transform a piece in this way.

Travel Sketchbook: Florence’s Boboli Gardens

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Boboli Gardens, diana camera, florence, italy, photography, toy camera, travel, travel photography

When we visited Florence a couple of years ago, we spent an afternoon wandering the paths of the Boboli Gardens, the beautiful ornamental gardens behind the Pitti Palace. The Boboli Gardens were one of the first and most formal 16th century Italian gardens. Elegant and lavishly designed, they were originally used only by the Medici family for private strolls.

The gardens are filled with statuary dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, along with Roman sculpture. This made for a photo-filled afternoon. I liked the way the lush foliage seemed to almost overwhelm the sculptures, which were scattered everywhere.

The gardens house all sorts of marvels, from a bizarre grotto to an amphitheater, with an emphasis on elaborate fountains, all linked together by alleyways and paths, dotted with sculptures and whimsical stonework. This lovely path is called the Ragnaie, or “Spiders Lane.”

When the Medici family bought the Pitti Palace in 1549, Cosimo and his wife Eleonora hired the famous mannerist architect and sculptor, Tribolo, to transform the hillside behind the palace into a formal garden. Once he accepted the undertaking, Tribolo promptly died, leaving the development of the gardens to Bartolommeo Ammanati and a slew of architects and designers.

The original design centered on an amphitheater behind the palace; the first play was performed there in 1576. This 1599 painting by Giusto Utens shows the amphitheater (the sunken area directly behind the palace) and the surrounding gardens.

The compact design seen above didn’t last long; the gardens were expanded upon for the next 300 years. Because this involved generations of designers, the gardens are considered a living outdoor museum of landscape architecture history.

Below is an etching from the 18th century. You can see the palace down in the lower left and the amphitheater above it. The gardens have exploded out to the right, with all sorts of beautiful interlocked circular patterns to take you on a leisurely stroll, usually ending in a fountain surrounded by ornate sculpture. The gardens cover almost 11 acres.

Despite its proximity to the Arno River, the gardens lacked a natural water supply. Special conduits were put in place in surrounding natural springs and rivers to keep the gardens hydrated and the fountains bubbling. These two monkeys live in a fountain next to the Porcelain Museum, one of the small buildings within the garden.

The Medici family, the ruling family of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, lived in the Pitti Palace from 1549 until 1737, when the last Medici family member died and the dynasty became extinct. The palace and its gardens then passed through a variety of hands, depending on the ruler of the day, until the property was presented to the nation in 1919 and opened to the public.

This is an 18th century rendering of the amphitheater, which seems to suggest that by this time, you might not have to be a family member to play in the garden.

As you depart the gardens, the lovely lady below waves goodbye from behind the palace. Perhaps to the consternation of the ghosts of the Medicis, today anyone can pay to enter the gardens and wander its well-worn paths.

All in the Family: The Needlework Continues

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craft, embroidery, handmade needlework, history of needlework, needlework, sewing

A few months ago, I posted a story about my grandmother Oma’s needlework (you can find it here). My mother then decided to give me almost all of Oma’s embroidery, except for the tablecloths we still use for Christmas dinner.

I don’t know anything about embroidery so I can’t discuss the techniques, but I find the work so beautiful that I decided to post photos. Some are embroidered tablecloths or runners, a few are place mats, and one is a pillow case. If anyone would like to shed light on the techniques, I’m all ears.

The history of embroidery isn’t at all what you’d expect. Once upon a time, in about 3,000 BC, embroidery was a man’s task. In ancient cultures around the world, it was taught to talented boys, who studied under masters in 10-year apprenticeships. 

It’s possibly one of the first forms of art, evolving in every part of the world where people practiced sewing, every region developing its own specific styles which were passed on through generations. 

This, of course, is how my grandmother learned the art, as part of her domestic education at school. At that time, her abilities had real value. They were an important part of being considered a desirable wife (she married in 1930), just one of the many domestic skills required to run a successful household at that time.

In the 20th century, as industry advanced, allowing needlework and other household tasks to become mechanized, society changed, and along with it, the expectations that society had of women and that women had of themselves. The value of handmade needlework began to dimish.

Today, the ability to do needlework has lost its value, and computers have taken over the task. Hand embroidery is considered a craft or hobby, two words that belittle the beauty and delicacy of this lost art, and downplay the extraordinary skill and patience required to create works composed of such minute detail. Needlework has executed a functional backflip, from a basic, essential skill for women of all classes to a practice enjoyed by those who have the luxury of time.

But of course everything evolves, and although needlework is no longer a part of everyday life for most of us, embroidery continues down new and intriguing paths. The art of embroidery has been appropriated by fine artists, who employ both hand stitched and computer generated techniques in their work.

If you’d like to see some interesting fine art, check out these artists:

Richard Saja, who embroiders scenes onto toile fabric.

Cindy Steiler, who creates embroideries framed in vintage and antiqued hoops.

Jenny Hart, who draws with needle and thread.

I’ll finish with my all-time favorite tablecloth from Oma’s stash. No matter how much I look at her work, it always knocks my socks off.

The yellow blossoms are each about 2 inches/5cm wide. The immaculate, evenly spaced little stitches are almost invisible.

Nothing less than perfect!

When Is It Time to Give Up? On Using the Right Tools

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central park, geology, glacial formations, glaciers, photography, pinhole photography, pinholes

One of the hardest things to figure out when making art is why an idea isn’t working. There’s a certain amount of stop and start when a new idea gets going and that’s an expected part of the process. It’s different when things won’t gel, when what you see in your mind’s eye isn’t within reach, despite many attempts. I ran into this problem when I began shooting the glacial formations in Central Park with my pinhole cameras.

During the Pleistocene age, several continental glaciers flowed across this region from northwest to southeast, moving across the Hudson Valley and what would eventually become the land beneath New York City. Through a combination of uplift and erosion caused by the glaciers, the bedrock, which had originally formed at depths of almost 20 miles, became exposed. Much of the rock in the southern part of the park is from the Hartland Formation, composed of sedimentary and volcanic rocks folded together, while the northern section consists of the Cambrian Manhattan Formation, more commonly known as Manhattan Schist.

When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in 1858, they recognized the impressive natural beauty of these geologic features and incorporated them into their Greensward Plan.

I had long admired the rock formations and thought it would be interesting to create a set of pinholes documenting them. I worked on it for nine months, for the most part unsuccessfully. What I saw as beautiful, dramatic formations were flattened by the pinhole camera. The undulations and jagged edges of the stone disappeared, the scale didn’t translate, and the incredible presence of the formations vanished. It took me a long time to admit that my method wasn’t working. While I did take a decent photo now and then, most of them went straight into the Failure File.

However, one of the first photos in the series, of Umpire Rock (below), came out just as imagined. At first, this made me think that the ensuing duds were unusual and that fabulous photos lay ahead, enticingly within reach. Nope.

My nemesis was a formation that I called Jaggy Rock, just north of the Children’s Zoo, at about Fifth Avenue and 67th Street. A remarkable, jagged mound of stone that clearly showed the direction of the glacial flow, it was impressive. Well, in person, it was impressive. Here it is shot with my phone.

Here’s a person standing on top for a sense of scale.

In my pinholes, it looked like an puny lump.

Maybe low angle would make it more dramatic? Uh, no.

What about a close up of that amazing texture? What is this thing?

I shot it close up and from a distance, on rainy days and dry, in the winter and the spring. It didn’t matter, it was either indecipherable or uninteresting.

Fascinating fact: New York City may not seem to be the most practical place to study geology, but the city’s rocky floor is one of the most exposed and excavated in the country. Excavations for subway and water tunnels, buildings and railroads have brought the rocks and minerals beneath the city into the hands of many happy geologists.

Another subject was Umpire Rock, one of the biggest and most spectacular natural exposures in the park. It has beautiful folds, areas where the rock resembles frozen liquid, and gorgeous glacial troughs at the northwest corner, where meltwaters once carved their way. Here they are, again shot with my phone. Look at these incredible grooves!

I tried to photograph the glacial troughs. As usual, I placed my camera on the ground, since I don’t use a tripod. This is the strange pinhole that resulted. I still can’t figure out what we’re looking at.

Some photos sort of worked when I used the rock as a feature of the landscape, but the stone’s drama is M.I.A.

Pow! This is what it’s really like.

This is one of the folds in the rock. Not a showstopper, but finally, some texture.

In person the surface looks more like this.

The grooves in the rock are caused by sand, pebbles and boulders embedded in the base of the glacier as it flowed over the slopes of the rocky hills. Most of the glacial formations have these grooves, lending a beautiful texture to the stone, which you wouldn’t know from the pinhole photos.

After months of frustration, I realized that this was no different than problems I encountered while painting. If a task is painfully difficult, if the technique should work but doesn’t, if I can imagine something but can’t bring it to fruition, then the first thing to do is to determine if I’m using the right tool. Instead of trying of force an outcome, it’s time to rethink the method. The details of these rock formations are better served by working with a different camera.

Eventually I began shooting the formations with a Diana camera. Suddenly, the texture, mood and drama were right there. What a difference!

Lesson learned: Sometimes an idea is sound, but the tools need to change in order to bring it to life.