Portland Slide

Here are some images of a slide in a park here in Portland. I love this thing. Everything that is wrong is what I love about it. The textures created by the years of use and lousy maintenance make this thing a masterpiece. How many kids have been bonked and bruised? How many dads have had to climb up and rescue their over ambitious kid, stuck at the top? I know at least one and he is me.

Someone poured some green house paint down the slide and the thick worn texture of the frozen stream caught my attention. It reminded me of carved acanthus leaves and whatnot found on 18th Century antiques. Not just the shape but the distress and the patina.

I don't really like the patina on this chair leg, I think it is bunk. Not the greatest example.

This looks nicer to me

So I started looking closely at this slide and was amazed to find such a rich agglomeration of textures and color. The layers of degradation competing with mildly effective coats of paint and moss and dirt and stickers give the structure a life story that I can't help but consider. That could be my problem but this kind of stuff keeps me from ever getting bored.

Scary music by Action Daddy

It is an aesthetic that I love. Back at Carlton House Restoration, we spent hundreds of hours applying hundreds of years of history to furniture pieces that had been "inappropriately" handled. As a matter of fact, in the early 80's there was a movement to make old furniture look as if it had just come out of the shop. So they would dip and strip all the life out of these things to make them look brand new. Then when that craze ended, we would get them and beat them up again to make them look like they were old, again. This costs thousands of dollars to do well. Crazy.

Here is an antique joke that my old boss and good friend Kenny made up and tried to tell a couple of movers as they brought in some important piece of furniture:

"Hey, how do you restore an American antique?"

Aesthetic Enhancement Devices On Display!

Bridging the gap between art and design with the launch of the Aesthetic Enhancement Device System next Thursday, here in Portland.

When I moved out of the Buttjoint Studio last July,  I took a look at my work surfaces as I dismantled the werkshop.  I have always loved the look and feel of a really worked surface. Layers of deliberate marks, gouges and spills create an Uberpatina.  It is a caricature of natural distress. Rich.  

So I chopped them up into 1' squares, framed them in mod bamboo, shellaced and waxed them, and boom, they are ready to hang.  Of course, I could make a dead cat look good with that scrumptious shellac and wax.  I freakin' love it.  There have been many occasions where my mouth starts to water as I gaze upon a waxy wood surface.  I have not yet actually taken a bite but I would not write that out as a potential future furniture faux pas on my part.  I almost chomped a WWI rifle stock I saw at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum last week.  My restraint is weakening but my resolve remains unscathed.

They are not art.  They are product. Actually they are a by-product.  They are ironically hectic remains from the fabrication process of all that clean lined, scandinavian inspired furniture. Each mark is explainable and has a reason.  As chaotic as it looks, each blemish is because of something and that justifies it for me.  

I think it would make a great architectural feature.  Sell it by the square foot.  Fake it.  Write a random program for the cnc router and start crankin'  sheets.  Word to your mother.  (ref: The New Old School Design Collective, 2002) 

Palimpsest

Joke:  

How do you restore an American Antique?

Put a velvet rope around it!!!

My looney friend Zack introduced me the concept of palimpsest a decade or so ago as we were looking at what is left of the old raised train tracks going through the meat packing district in NYC.   It has become a consistent source of interest for me.  I love the idea because it is like a still picture that contains a whole movie.  A sort of transdimensional section of time embodied in the physical traits of an object or place.  

When I used to do antique conservation we would sometimes add piece of wood to an old piece of furniture.  I would take great pains to match the wood grain and create an invisible seam so that the finishers could then beat it up appropriately to match the old patina.  As a matter of fact, during the 1980's there was a movement to dip and strip antiques and refinish them to try to achieve the look the piece might have had when it first left Duncan Phyfe's shop back in 1845. 

Suddenly everyone came to their senses and realized that all of the character and history of these important antiques were in the bumps and dings.  They would send the pieces to us at Carlton House Restoration and we would spend many expensive hours essentially faking 200 years of history into 40 hours.