Looks Like We Made It

There’s a limited window of opportunity to paint the exterior of your house here in western Maine. The winters start early and end late. The days get very short very fast. Back when I lived in Massachusetts, I used to figure that once Halloween rolled around, you can’t work effectively outside anymore. In Maine, you can forget about the first 30 days of October, too.

So anytime I get a chance, with good weather, not too many bugs, not too much direct sun, not too much chance of rain, and no way to make up an excuse to avoid it for no good reason, I paint stuff outside. I had a one-day window to paint a portion of the house that really needed it, and I took it.

When we first moved here, this is what the area in question looked like:

There’s a fifteen-foot drop to your death off that platform. There was once a catwalk that stretched over to the door, but it decided it wanted to see Australia before it died, and headed in that direction. The platform was a bad idea even before that. The valley made by the two rooflines above dumps a lot of water right there, and plenty of snow in the winter. There is a flight of concrete stairs buried in the ground on the right. They built a wall and filled it in with this and that when they decided they needed a parking space more than stairs to the basement. There’s a pull chain light fixture with a broken bulb in the socket on the wall, if you need a jolt to get going in the morning.

Here’s the view looking down from a second floor window. As you can see, there’s a railing where you don’t need it, and it stops when you do. Plenty of cable TV wires, on the roof, though. Every one of the screws they used to run them along the metal roofing leaked until I fixed them. Rain indoors is a small price to pay for Family Feud reruns, I guess.

I dangerproofed the railing right away when we moved in. Just posts and the top and bottom rail, because lumber is expensive, and too much safety around the house makes dull children. But this summer, I found myself with some 2x4s hanging around and put in some crossbucks. I painted the whole thing Montgomery White when I was done, to match the house trim.

The platform was another matter. Buried under the rotting wood and indoor/outdoor carpet, I found two concrete steps. They’d come out hard if I tried to demolish them, so I decided to work with them. We made a little garden spot for pots:

Victorians liked pierced fence and railing slats like these. They’re pretty simple to make and lend a little interest to a drab spot. The plants turned in to mini-jungle pretty quick, and covered the steps almost completely.

All that was in the summer. With the days getting shorter, we have to limit the real estate we’re renovating to stay in our one-day window of opportunity. We’ll paint this corner:

It was in need of a lot of attention. That metal apparatus is the pellet stove exhaust. I’ve removed the candy cane portion of vertical pipe to get at the wall. Burning wood pellets is pretty clean, compared to firewood, but eventually the soffit and eave above got pretty dirty looking. Burn fifty tons of anything, and you’ll get soot.

The scraping was pretty easy, all in all. Just a little elbow grease. People make all sorts of mistakes diagnosing peeling paint. I could ask for opinions from internet wags and “pro” painters alike why this paint is peeling, and they’d all get it wrong. The paint peeled because the roof leaked. I showed you the metal roof above, peppered with holes from the ghosts of cable TV past. Ice dams formed in the valley, water backed up behind it, and the water got behind the siding. In the spring, it wanted to go outside, same as we did. It pushed the paint off on the way out.

If you hire a “pro” painter, they’ll probably tell you that you need to pressure-wash the house first. This involves injecting hundreds of gallons of water in to your siding under the guise of washing it. It will want to get back out in the spring too, and take the paint off on the way, so you can start the process all over again. So wash your siding with a long-handled brush in a bucket of water with a little detergent, and rinse it off with a hose and you’ll be fine. I did.

We’ve re-roofed, and I filled in at least 70-percent of the little holes, and I have a roof rake that helps avoid ice dams. I doubt I’ll have any more problems here. About half the house could use a fresh coat of paint, but this is the worst spot, so we’ll put it first in line.

This is me falling off a ladder, or having a coughing fit, or sleeping, or something similar. Before I paint, I caulk all the seams and putty the odd nailhole. Preparation is all the work. Painting is easy and fast.

That’s late afternoon sun, and I’m finishing up. Whew. I guess we made it.

[I’m painting the laundry room today. Tune in tomorrow to see if I screwed it up]

Watercolors Are Impossible

Well, here is this fellow, Joseph Zbukvic, doing the impossible, and letting you watch him do it. He’s painting in watercolors and ending up with something other than a mess. John Singer Sargent could do it, but he was a magician, not really an artist.

If You Make Things, You Are My Sister. Medieval Painting

Marvelous work, nicely presented. I’ve dabbled, er, meddled, um, futzed around with — at any rate, I’ve bluffed and hamfisted my way to a check by doing decorative painting. It’s not the same sort of work as in the video, mind you, but it requires a similar appetite for tedium. I have such an appetite for certain kinds of interesting tedium that it’s crowded out all the regular tedium from my life that regular people enjoy. The Intertunnel is a wonderful and terrible thing for people like me. It’s full of stuff like this video. Durn inneresting.

It has to take the place of leisure. If you add paying attention to such things to regular leisure, there’s no productive time left in your life. Occasionally, I try accurately describing my life to an acquaintance, because they’ve asked nicely enough, enough times, and a look comes over their face that is equal admixture of: You’re nuts, and: You must be fibbing. When I see that look, I always regret telling the truth, and go back to small talk. I’m on something along the lines of three decades now of relatives of all shapes and sizes arriving at my house and wondering aloud, in a horrified tone: What do you mean there’s no TV? Terror-stricken, they are. Me, I figure you must think you’re going to live to be ten thousand years old if you watch an episode of 2 Broke Girls or a Jacksonville/ Tampa Bay game. 

I wish I could live to be ten thousand years old, so I could try my hand at all this wonderful, tedious stuff. Life’s short, so you look at it in wonder and affection, and then move on. That Evangeline Table’s not going to sand itself, you know.

Beautiful Things. Beautiful People

(Lakeshore – Isaac Levitan)

Mizz E visits and comments here regularly. She’s an educator. She’s a generous contributor to the boys’ music fund for which I am grateful. She has a very sunny avatar picture. Brightens my day to see it.

She’s got a Tumblr page going. I’ve added it to my moribund and mostly obsolete blogroll. Look for it under Tail Feathers.

It’s ottist stuff, mostly. It’s from people I’m not familiar with much. Lends an air of discovery to it. I like looking at John Singer Sargent pitchas as much as the next guy — more, is more likely — but I’d like to see something different from time to time. But not bad. Some people just have a knack for curating Intertunnel collections. They’re coherent and interesting. I’m generally only one or the other of those things at a time, so I like to see them melded once in a while.

Tail Feathers

Let’s Stop Mucking Around And Show You Someone That Knows What He’s Doing. Graham Rust

Most decorative painting is dreadful. Bad ideas, inexpertly done. I’d say amateurishly done, but of course the word “amateur” is derived from the Latin word for love. To do something for love is supposed to transcend the motive of filthy lucre. Everyone just loves making a mess to my eye. I stand by my assertion that there are few things in this world more dangerous than a gallon of metallic paint in the hands of a housewife. Only a professional could do worse, because they can do as bad a job faster. 

“Real”artists try their hand at murals and so forth to keep themselves in absinthe and Gauloises between “real” commissions. They hate the customers and their houses and their lives and their own lives and paint really small things all over a really big area. It’s not portrait painting, only bigger, so they fail miserably and expensively. Even if it was portrait painting, most “real” artists are totally flummoxed by any request to paint anything that’s a recognizable representation of life. They were absent that one day at college when that one teacher mentioned it, derisively, before returning to women with their nose to the left of their three eyes.

But every once in a while, someone knows what they are doing, and finds someone that knows how to pay them, and you get extraordinary results. Graham Rust is like that. Of course it took him fifteen years or so to finish Ragley Hall, pictured in the video. I had no idea England has a union for wall artists. Don’t kill the job! is on their coat of arms, I imagine.

Graham Rust books on Amazon.

Remember: Go big or go home. Graham Rust’s website.

Before The Fall When They Wrote It On The Wall, When There Wasn’t Even Any Hollywood

Sorry about the scans; don’t have a good scanner available. At least you can clicky-pop it and look at it larger. It’s not that “bright” in real life. I think I referred to Decorating Magic by John Sutcliffefor the sandstone wall motif. The book’s out of print but you can get a used one for cheap. It’s not really a how-to book as much as an overview of possibilities. It’s 20 years old, but not much looks stupid in it. 20-month-old design magazines usually look insane. Good work doesn’t get painted over every couple years. Fads come and go. I told you to stay away from cocoa brown and powder blue, but did you listen?

I wrote about painting this room many years ago:

House Painter

I’ve had lots of interesting jobs in my life. I’ve had lots of very uninteresting jobs, too, but they always seemed to turn interesting somehow. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m unlikely to figure it out now.

I used to paint. I’ve painted lots of things. Plain things. Ornate things. Big things. Little things. Important things. A long, long time ago when I was a young man I was offered a job by a man I hardly knew for a project that was just beginning. He said he was painting the White House. There was something about the offer that told me that all the “interesting” was on the cover of the book, as it were, but all the pages were blank. It sounded exciting but turns out boring. I am not generally wise, but I turned it down, and had a glint of recognition a few years ago, when I read an obscure notice in some publication that the job was completed. “My mind is kind,” my older brother says often, meaning we often forget that which is unimportant, but I think 6 presidential terms had gone by in the interim. I’d had 4 or 5 careers in the interim.

There is a reaction, somewhat common at the Post Office, which is featured on the news from time to time, that inflicts people who seek a sinecure and then are faced with endless quotidian diet of the same damn thing. Be careful what you wish for.

Anyway, I used to paint on the walls. There’s a long and proud tradition of painting on the walls, and I was allowed to be included in that tradition, even if it had a little less Michaelangelo to it than maybe it should have.

Trompe l’Oeil. Fool the eye, it’s called. There’s a fellow named Graham Rust who’s published a few books about it recently, and is very good at it. If I had dedicated my entire life to it, or at least as much of my life as the average White House painting job lasts, I’d probably be about half as good at it as he. I dabbled. It was fun.

It’s hard to explain fool the eye. It’s like a joke; if the audience doesn’t laugh, it’s pointless to explain it. It’s not a mural exactly, it’s more like an illusion of depth or space or material. The lines between all these various kinds of painting on the wall are fuzzy. It falls in and out of favor, but goes all the way back to a cave in Spain. Any Steely Dan fan knows that. Out of favor or not, it’s not going away any time soon. Upon reflection, it’s not the only thing I have in common with stone age men.

The picture above is a powder room in a fairly elaborate sort of Gothic revival house. The owners of the house were the nicest people I’ve ever had as customers. Everyone who knows them would give them a kidney, but they don’t need any. They wanted interesting things to look at in their home, and I hope they’re still interested in it after all these years.

I jabber all the time. But like many who talk too much, I don’t reveal much, really. The words are for you; my thoughts are my own. But I’m going to explain why I did what I did in that room for the first time, ever, although it’s been over ten years since I did it.

People would rely on me for advice, guidance towards what was possible as much as what was desirable. And when I was smart, sometimes I’d offer advice that was pointed towards the ultimate benefit of the end user, without them really understanding it. That’s risky — if you fail, you can’t go back and explain why you did what you did.

There was this magnificent house. You’d walk in the front doors, which were massive mahogany items, and enter an big hexagonal foyer, with a marble parquet disc in the center of the floor copied from a portion of the floor at St. Mark’s in Venice. Two and a half stories up there was a mural of the sky. But the architect was trying too hard to impress, and forgot his real job. The very first thing you noticed in that house, the thing that caught your eye first and foremost — was a toilet in the powder room off this foyer.

Trailer park meets mansion. The powder room was very small, too, but the ceiling was high, as the first floor rooms had high ceilings. It was like an elevator shaft with a crapper in it. As the picture demonstrates, it’s hard to get far enough away from anything in that room to even get a picture of it.

I painted all that stuff on the walls and ceilings with the help of my brothers, and the owner of the house later told me that she couldn’t keep anyone out of that room. Her children were instructed to use one of the other numerous bathrooms in the house, but they’d sneak in there to look at the stuff on the walls, sometimes even when they didn’t need to use the toilet.

The owner was pleasant enough to tell me that the little powder room was the most memorable thing in the house to a visitor. I was pleasant enought to refrain from telling her that it was even more memorable, in a different way, before I started.

Graham Rust books at Amazon

The Third Or The Fifth Of July Or Whatever

I can’t remember where I found the image this is taken from. It was some sort of instruction book for painting…

*** rummage, rummage, rummage***

Ah, yes; How to Draw and Paint What You See
, by Ray Smith.

I painted this on the wall a long time ago for my first son, who dearly loved to go to the 4th of July fireworks. For such a small town, they were quite elaborate. Then the town began getting strange about them. They tried to hold the fireworks on any day except July 4th, because they cared nothing for the meaning of the holiday, only their fireworks display. They deliberately timed it one year to avoid having anyone from outside of town see them. We stopped going. Stopped living there, too.

Anyway, his bed faced the fireworks, and in the wan light of the nightlight, they seemed to glow a little. I’d never painted anything with a monochrome underpainting with colored glaze before. If you’re unfamiliar with painting, you paint a more or less black and white painting first, and then layer washes of transparent color over it. It’s all acrylic, so the work goes fast. I think I did it over a weekend.

It’s just a workmanlike thing. I had sketches to banish the rest of the walls with autumn trees with rope swings, and a sailboat heeling in the breeze, and other assorted tripe. The band of wall above a high wainscot makes a nice, manageable frieze for such things. I never got around to it.

I find I gain a lot of information from mundane sources. Don’t get me wrong; there isn’t much useful information in almost any instructional material anymore. They either are bluffing their way through topics they know little about, or they mete it out with an eyedropper to make the most money. Don’t kill the job, as a man leaning on a shovel looking at someone else in a hole might say. But if you have a hundred bad How-To books, you can figure out how to do anything, if you can deduce which one percent of what you’re reading isn’t worthless.

Michelangelo said sculpting was easy. You just cut away the parts of the block that don’t look like David. I just left the colors on the palette that didn’t look like a bonfire and fireworks.

Is This The Most Popular Thing Ever Painted?

How would you measure such a thing? I imagine you could shove a copy of La Gioconda under the whole world’s nose, and 99 out of 100 might recognize the old girl. But everyone knows who Hitler is, too. (This is the Intertunnel. Eventually everyone mentions Hitler) Recognizable is not the same as popular.Would you plunk down money for a print of Mona Lisa? I wouldn’t. I live in a 1901 Free Classic Victorian, and I’d hang a Parrish print in any room in it. If the walls could take the weight, that is. Bang a hook around here, and you might end up outside. Still, the urge is there.

It is estimated that 25 percent of all the houses in the United States had a print of “Daybreak” by Maxfield Parrish hanging in them in the 1920s. That’s popular. Leonardo could only sell the smirky woman once. Parrish made a pile on his nymphs.

The actual painting changed hands in 2006 for $7.6 million. 7.6 mil will get you into the Louvre, it’s true, but you won’t be unscrewing much of anything recognizable from the walls for that sum, never mind the Mona Lisa. But that’s a lot of money for an American painting. I think it means something.

When I was younger, that painting was considered about par with Dogs Playing Poker by the intellectual set. I find lots of stuff like it having a bit of a renaissance recently. I’m not sure if the Intertunnel has anything to do with it. Say what you want about it, but the Internet does lend at least a veneer of democracy of interest to cultural things, even though it has huge blind spots. By Intertunnel standards, George Lucas painted the Sistine Chapel on a break from writing Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s still a useful way to see what people are interested in. Guys on the artistic “outs” like Parrish and Mucha and other contemporaries are comparatively everywhere on the Intertunnel. People are interested in them. That has not always been the case. Hell, Google even gave Mucha a Google Doodle salute on his birthday.

Parrish paintings and illustrations were immensely popular in their time, and when the great, glum, decade of the thirties followed the ebullient twenties, I think people associated it with a burp from a sumptuous meal they’d already eaten, but they couldn’t afford to buy a second time. It reminded them of plenty, and sackcloth and ashes doesn’t do plenty.

Parrish seems downright Byronic compared to the rest of the art world, living out in the woods in New Hampshire and tossing brilliant lightning bolts down on the world. The approach sounds familiar. Like all Romantics, he didn’t want to settle for the world as it was, and so made one of his own.

Or maybe the world really is like that, and all he did was transcribe it, and we’re too glum to see it.

The Richness Of Meagre Company

Click for a really big shue.

Franz Hals painted this one. Well, he started painting it. Had a “helper” who painted a lot of it, with enough juice to get mentioned, too; Pieter Codde. Maybe Hals was too tired from naming it to finish it. It’s original name is: Officers of the Company of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard Under Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz. An art critic decided that the men pictured were so slender and his ink was so precious that he’d call them the Meagre Company instead, and the nickname has stuck.

It’s hanging around the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. They know a little something about painting in those parts.

Hals was hired because he had a rep for interesting poses for large groups, but he got tired of commuting to Amsterdam from Haarlem, and when the Civic Guard told him to paint faster or he wouldn’t get paid, Hals told them that if the postman doesn’t come, it’s from me. The skinny soldiers hired Codde to finish it for them. People familiar with the two artists can easily tell who did what from looking at the painting. Hals was less fussy and more powerful. I always find that interesting.

I love the black in it. Only Spaniards and Hopper could use black all over the place better.

Tag: painting

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