Graphic designer and woodworker Tom Buhl reproduced an illustration of “Grandpa’s Workshop” for the Santa Barbara I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival, and it is quite cool.
You can see more photos of the painting being made here. See more of Tom’s work here.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor’s note: Normally, we would not post a blog entry such as this, where a writer abuses a fine Belgian ale. But because this is Brian Anderson, who happily translated “Grandpa’s Workshop” for all of us, I am willing to cut him some slack. This time. If he abuses anything more than a saison in the future, however, we will have to come down hard upon him.
Among the rolling hills and pastoral landscapes of southern Belgium, a countryside of old stone houses with red-tiled roofs and fresh-faced rosy-cheeked milkmaids, a community of Trappist Monks has been lovingly crafting truly divine beer since 1862.
Among those beers is Chimay Blue. As the monks write, “This authentic Belgian beer, whose tinge of fresh yeast is associated with a light rosy flowery touch, is particularly pleasant. Its aroma, perceived as one enjoys it, only accents the delightful sensations revealed by the odour, all revealing a light but agreeable caramelized note.”
The other evening, I happened to be sipping a glass of that particular nectar of the gods, bubbling it gently in my mouth, and then exhaling through my nose, delighting in the yeasty freshness and the rosily caramelized aromas. Was that indeed a floral hint of vanilla beans? But anyway, after finishing an estimate for some translation work and jointing some drywall, I was rummaging around the net for old paint recipes, and there it was:
Beer Paint!
“Distemper made from beer is prepared by mixing pigment and beer (Dark lager as “Rød Tuborg” or “Gamle Carlsberg” is said to be the best (this is an English site but a Danish source) in a way that the paint is having great covering power and is easy to apply.
When working with minor works, for instance decorating like woodgraining or marbling, the beer-colour is often mixed on the palette. The pigment is placed on the palettte, if necessary mixed with other pigments. You dip the brush in the beer and mix the colour on the palette. Use an artistic brush.
Beer paint is often used as a glazing but is not waterproof. If you apply a lacquer afterwards it will make it waterproof.
Qualities: Mat with a beautiful reflection of light. Some of the pigments are glazing but they do not come off.
Drying: 1-2 hours.
Use: Only indoors and only on absorbing material: Paper, setting coat (dry), rough or planed wood.”
See: http://www.ibiblio.org/london/rural-skills/homemade/homemade-paint
http://www.earthpigments.com/finishes/beer-glaze.cfm
Wow, how cool is that? But while I have known folks to get pretty distempered while drinking beer, especially if you spill theirs on the rug, what the heck is distemper paint? Paint in which the binder is a diluted glue, I learned.
Well, why not. They say beer is watery bread, and bread is made from flour, and flour mixed with water was long used as a glue….
The bad news: you have to use good beer. At the store the next day, I was torn between Guinness and the Chimay, but the Chimay was really the only choice because I didn’t need all that much beer to make enough paint for an experiment, and I like Chimay better than Guinness, which is the good news about the bad news about the good beer. No waste. Unless you mix too much paint.
The other thing about beer paint is that apparently the beer should be flat. So that afternoon I found myself whisking beer in a small bowl to get the gas out of it. Cue Roger, my neighbor, who gives me tools, and knocked on the kitchen window, needing a hand.
“Brian, why are you stirring beer in a bowl?” he asked me when I opened the window, taking in the open bottle of Chimay Blue on the kitchen table.
Roger is a kind neighbor with an unusually flexible mindset when it comes to stuff like this. But he was a painter before he was a roofer before he was a plumber. Beer paint was not working for him. He shook his head. “Come on, I have to hang a water heater on a wall down in the Port (an ancient little neighborhood down on the Cher River in my village). The damn thing is too heavy.”
The water tank was sleek, streamlined even, like a re-entry vehicle for a space probe, and the manufacturer had thoughtfully coated it with some kind of greasy wax for the kind of special sheen that spells quality when you are shopping for a water heater. It was impossible to get a grip on the thing: the perfect mix of form and function in design if you would like to torture the people who need to actually install it.
After Roger taught me a number of French idiomatic expressions that one could be jailed for using in public, and dislocating a disk, I mixed up the paint. After messing with it a bit, I found that with the Chimay beer at least, it works better as a kind of wash or stain, but it works best if you gently warm the mix and let the alcohol and some water evaporate.
So I grabbed a stool I made a while back out of some offcuts in glue-lam birch and scraped and sanded the wax/stain off the top to see how it worked.
Looks like a fine beer distemper. Dries hard with no smell.
After a coat of shellac. Works just fine.
— Brian Anderson
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP when speaking of distemper, monks, shellac, woodworking and mad chefing: A remarkably efficient way to receive an early morning tonsure by your distempered wife using an antique saw is to leave a coffee jar full of shellac flakes, of the same brand that your wife uses in her warm milk in the morning, on the kitchen counter where she might mistake it for a coffee jar full of coffee.
Despite word from Tibet from my milk paint supplier that Agnes the yak was busy assembling her hope chest and flirting shamelessly with a certain strapping young specimen of yakhood, I decided that I needed to take the bull by the horns and get on with painting my six-board chest.
I poured a liter (quart) of skim milk into the soup pan, let it warm on very low heat to the point where there were just the faintest hints of steam coming off it, and then added 4 cl (1.5 fluid ounces) of vinegar –stirring a few swipes, enough to mix, but no more. This is not a critical thing, the curds will form in one way or another. You can even just let it sit at room temperature, but that will take hours. The important thing is not to bring the mix to a boil.
I did this twice, and the second time I ended up with much less cohesive curds. No matter. After washing, it looked the same. If you substitute whole milk and maybe a little cream, and lemon juice in place of the vinegar, the same process will yield a fabulous farmer’s (or ricotta or quark if you want to be fancy about it) cheese.
You pour out the “cottage cheese” into a strainer lined with cotton cloth, and then rinse it under cold water two or three times. Given that vinegar is an acid used to curdle the casein milk protein and separate it from the whey, this is an important step in that a basic powder in the form of slaked lime or chalk is often added to the cheese, which if not rinsed could cause a chemical reaction that would spoil the mix, at least. Then I added water to a handful of slaked lime with a couple of pinches of borax mixed in. In place of the slaked lime, you could use various kinds of finely ground chalk powder, or nothing. The lime or chalk powder is a filler, and results in a more pastel color. But some just add the pigment directly to the cheese and go from there. The borax is to help break down the casein protein in the fresh cheese, increase the adhesiveness of the paint, and adds some anti-microbial protection.
It took a while to mix all of the lumps out. Would have gone faster with an electric mixer, but that would have been too much for even my remarkably tolerant better half. “Darling, you know I love it when you whip up a new recipe, but if you even think about serving rusty nails and hinges braised in vinegar this evening, you will be sleeping in the rabbit hutch tonight.” We don’t have a doghouse.
The other thing was I used a natural hydraulic lime, NHL3.5, instead of the non-hydraulic lime usually recommended, because that was what I had. It worked OK, but you have to use the paint quickly and stir often because the lime will start into its hydraulic set after a while, and the paint becomes useless.
It doesn’t show in the photo, but I used a little more lime and a little less pigment for the second coat and it gave the chest the slightly two-toned look I was aiming for.
Mostly people use linseed oil for a topcoat over the milk paint to give it a little depth and a slight gloss. I wanted to finish the inside of the chest, too. You can’t use linseed oil inside a chest, especially one that will be used to hold clothes or linens, because it starts to stink after a while. So I opted for some lovely natural shellac I picked up a while back. Just the ticket.
It’s done.
All in all a good experiment. Start to finish, making the paint is about a 20-minute process. There are a number of recipes online. Lots of different permutations, but the upshot is that it really isn’t that critical what you do or which ingredients/quantities you opt for, as long as you make enough for the whole job, or are looking for the slightly two-tone effect.
— Brian Anderson, the translator of “Grandpa’s Workshop.”
Well, actually it was more like a 12-board chest, but they were 2-meter-long skinny tongue-and-groove floorboards that I glued together, so I guess it still counts. I have ended up using quite a bit of the tongue-and-groove pine, either 3/4″ flooring or 3/8″ wainscoting, for different things. The wood I get here in France is maritime pine from plantations down in the Landes region near Bordeaux. Not a fine Bordeaux of woods to work, certainly, and not for fine furniture. But it comes dimensioned, planed and sanded on two sides in widths from 4″ to 8″. Saves a lot of time when gluing up boards or making frame-and-panel sections for furniture or traditional paneling. It’s also dirt cheap, well under a buck a board foot. And with a little filler for the knots, it takes a beautiful paint, oil or varnish finish.
I am putting the finishing touches on a guest bedroom in my house here in the Touraine region of France. The bedroom had been basically a hay loft with a kind of adobe floor laid over split chestnut sticks and plastered underneath, but when we bought the house it had most of the wiring and drywall in place. So anyway, I’ve been plugging away at finishing it out, hanging and jointing drywall, repointing the exposed stone with lime mortar, and laying a “random”-width pine floor and building in some storage. A bed was next on the list, after I cut and moulded and installed the baseboards, and finished painting everything, and installed another built-in bookshelf to cover some junction boxes that could have been installed more discretely.
But then this Schwarz character, as Peter Follansbee likes to call him, started going on about these six-board chests. Which are really kind of cool, I thought. What could be better for the foot of the bed, to hold linens and whatnot? Plus I needed something else to do with some of the offcuts and extra boards from the floor.
Firing up my old German ECE moving fillister to cut the rabbets.
The nails I used for the sides and bottom are some German boat “nails” I ordered a while back. Nice hand-forged looking head, square shaft, mostly used with a rove as rivets to join lapstrake or clinker boat hulls. You drill a hole in the fitted planks, drive the nail through, drive the washer-like rove down over the shaft of the nail, cut the shaft leaving it a bit proud, and then use a backing iron and a hammer to mushroom out the shaft over the rove. They call them clinker hulls because of the noise the hammers make heading the rivets. (For the top I used regular wire nails, with the zinc on the head filed off, clenched over)
As nails though, this batch at least was not as advertised, because the “chisel” point was not actually pointy enough to be driven into a stick of butter with anything short of a sledge hammer.
My name is Brian and I individually sharpen my nails.
I was fitting the hinges when the girls came up and claimed the chest for their toys. Have to fit a sliding till it seems. And then build another one. No, two.
“You have two daughters, Papa.”
I also wanted to dive into milk paint. I found a mom-and-pop operation based somewhere around Lille near the Belgian border, ordered a couple of packages and then began checking the mailbox. And checking. So after a while I sent off an e-mail about my order.
The other day I got a very enthusiastic but somewhat vague response with this photo. Apparently they are in the process of changing the milk supplier for their customers in the Touraine. In view of the terroir of the region, nothing less than skim Tibetan yak milk from Ganden Monastery will do, and they will be shipping as soon as this girl reaches maturity, and finds a suitable husband also capable of pulling the cart full of skim milk to Lhasa Airport.
OK. Clearly something had to be done.
From René Fontaine’s “The French Country House” (Seghers Press, 1977) here’s a traditional recipe for milk paint (slightly paraphrased).
“Here are a couple of recipes for types of paint, long forgotten. The bizarrity of the formula corresponds perfectly to the mentality of these people attached to the earth. We have no doubt as to the effectiveness of the paints.
“To a liter of skim milk, we add 180 grams of slaked lime, 120 grams of linseed oil and 2.5 kilos of Spanish White. In practice, we pour the skim milk over the slaked lime and Spanish White and gradually add the linseed oil into the mix, stirring constantly.
“For the second of these paints, we mix 140 grams of cottage cheese, 7 grams of slaked lime, 280 grams of chalk powder and 80 grams of water. Practically speaking, we mix the slaked lime with the cheese, a little water and stir in the chalk powder.
“For the last, something completely different: 500 grams of potatoes mixed with 1 kilo of chalk powder and 3.8 liters of skim milk. For this one, we boil the potatoes, after peeling them, and then strain the potatoes. We then pour in the skim milk, and stir while sifting in the chalk.”
Wow. As I understand it, it helps to add a couple of teaspoons of borax powder to act as an antibacterial agent and to help make the casein – the protein in the milk, which is the binder and a very strong glue in its own right – water-soluble. (Basically, milk paint is real cottage cheese mixed with a pigment and some chalk powder and/or slaked lime.) One can then use various kinds of earth pigments, or even gouache or oil paints to achieve various pastel colors.
— Brian Anderson, the translator of “Grandpa’s Workshop.”
It is not often that my love of tool geekery and word geekery coincide. But over several posts about “Grandpa’s Workshop” and the besaigue (bisaigue) there have been some questions about the tool and how to pronounce the word.
It is pronounced, bees-ay-goo with the last “o” there kind of swallowed.
Maurice Pommier the author and illustrator of the book, offered up this info on the origins of the word.
From the “Robert Dictionary:” feminine noun, dates to the 12th century, from Latin, “bis acuta”, sharpened twice – a carpenters tool with two cutting tools, one a mortise chisel, the other a chisel.
From “Larousse Dictionary:” feminine noun, from Latin “bis” – twice, “acuta” – sharpened.
The gold standard for traditional tools in France is Daniel Boucard, who has published several books on the topic including “Dictionnaire des Outils” and traces the first mention of the word to 1160, and says that the word was originally spelled “BESAIGÜE”
– Brian Anderson, the translator of “Grandpa’s Workshop.”