This is a continuation of posts that began a couple of weeks ago; I recommend that you start at the beginning of them (if you haven't), as they are somewhat sequential, unlike this post, which I realized, while writing it, is out of sequence to the progress of jobs at the house. Can you imagine a residential project that lasts so long that you forget which room came first? That's the nature of this job, which I have been involved with for almost 10 years now!
The first project after the upstairs hallways was for a library ceiling in a new room that had been created from two smaller rooms. My client had become enamored of the idea of the English library, with paneled walls, parquet floor, and neo-classical ceiling a la Robert Adam. The design was a bit tricky as the room is long and narrow, with doors that open on the long sides and an asymmetrical layout for the end where the desk sits.
This was the first design I came up with. My client wished for a bit more depth, and also the color purple, so I did a second design that had a different colorway and a more centralized image, while still lining up with the entry doors. Symmetry and alignment are a big part of neo-classical design, and I spent many hours laboring over how to arrange things so that they would line up correctly.
Here was the second design. The brown border represents the crown molding as it undulates over the doors and mantel. I used Photoshop to give me an accurate template for the trompe l'oeil curving of the central section. The cartouches around the border each contain painted bas relief busts of famous artists, musicians, and writers. The central image in this design was of Mercury, but was later replaced by a scene of Jupiter and Ganymede that I cribbed from a drawing that Michelangelo had done but never painted.
This is one of the full sized samples that I made both for the client's approval and to work out the colors and techniques I would use in the actual mural. It's about 14" high by 8 feet long. I made a number of similar samples of different areas of the mural so that we would both have a solid idea of what the finished product would look like. I designed it so that the border is a separate strip of canvas that surrounds the central section, so that I would have a bit of leeway to adjust the placement during installation. Measurements are my nemesis- it seems that no matter how many times I measure something, I inevitably end up slightly off somewhere, and I like to give myself some safety measures so I won't have to start something over. There's nothing I detest more than having to do something over again because of a mistake I've made in measuring.
Here's an early shot of the central portion of the mural, which shows Jupiter, in the form of an eagle, swooping down to snatch the beautiful young Ganymede and bring him back to Mt Olympus to be his "cup bearer". This story, which is widely seen as an allegory for homosexual love, has been depicted thousands of times in art, going all the way back to the Greeks. In this picture you can see my sketches on the left, and a painted maquette I did for it on the right side.
This is how it turned out in the end. The putti I borrowed from Tiepolo; the upper one holds the cup that will later be Ganymede's. The smaller roundels, which you can see in the upper photo, each had depictions of various Roman gods, and were surrounded by ornament painted to look like carved plaster on a colored background, as Wedgwood or Adams might have done. Because the ground was skewed to give the illusion of a vaulted ceiling, each piece had to be drawn custom and transferred to the canvas. My method is to draw the ornament on tracing paper, then to trace it to the back side of the paper (cleaning up the lines as I go) then flip it back over and rub the drawing from the front with a bone burnisher to transfer it to the painting area. Here's a drawing for part of the ornament surrounding the roundels.
You can see how the roundness of the roundel is distorted because of its being seen in a curved perspective. Thank you Photoshop!Here's how that ornament looks rendered in paint
After the center was done I did the strips of border (I'd do it all at once, but my studio isn't that big.) The portrait busts on the window side of the room all have up lighting to reflect how they would look in natural light, so they look a bit spooky.
Once the border was done I brought it all up there, and with the help of almost every single person at the house (including the housekeeper and the owner!) we got it up and aligned properly. I was actually off by about two inches in my measurement of the length, but because I had planned ahead and had room to spare on the borders, it was unnoticeable. After it was up and set for a few days, I filled the seams between the center and the borders, then added an antiquing glaze, sanded the whole thing to bring it some age, and finally varnished with a matt varnish. Here's how it looked installed:
Epilog: after this ceiling had been installed for a few months, my clients heard water running late one night and came downstairs to find that a rat had chewed through a sink hose in the kitchen, which is directly above this room, and that a large amount of water had seeped through the floor and formed numerous bubbles behind the surface of this mural. We're talking 4 foot diameter bubbles that probably contained a gallon or two of water each! The parquet flooring was the more immediate problem, and we decided to see if (after draining it) the ceiling would dry out on its own and tighten up. Not the case! They came home from a trip to find the mural, with half of the drywall still attached to it, lying across the top of the furniture in the room. After removing the part that was still glued to the ceiling, I began the laborious task of getting all the drywall, paper, paint and wallpaper paste off the back side so I could reattach it once they had repaired the ceiling. It took a great deal of soaking and scraping to get it all off, but in the end, it made me feel very confident about the longevity of the technique and materials I use, in that after all that abuse, I lost very little of the actual paint work of the mural, and it didn't even shrink enough to make much of a difference at all. In fact, I think the end result was an improvement, as I added a small molding to the edge of the border that makes the trompe l'oeil even stronger.
The first project after the upstairs hallways was for a library ceiling in a new room that had been created from two smaller rooms. My client had become enamored of the idea of the English library, with paneled walls, parquet floor, and neo-classical ceiling a la Robert Adam. The design was a bit tricky as the room is long and narrow, with doors that open on the long sides and an asymmetrical layout for the end where the desk sits.
Here was the second design. The brown border represents the crown molding as it undulates over the doors and mantel. I used Photoshop to give me an accurate template for the trompe l'oeil curving of the central section. The cartouches around the border each contain painted bas relief busts of famous artists, musicians, and writers. The central image in this design was of Mercury, but was later replaced by a scene of Jupiter and Ganymede that I cribbed from a drawing that Michelangelo had done but never painted.
This is one of the full sized samples that I made both for the client's approval and to work out the colors and techniques I would use in the actual mural. It's about 14" high by 8 feet long. I made a number of similar samples of different areas of the mural so that we would both have a solid idea of what the finished product would look like. I designed it so that the border is a separate strip of canvas that surrounds the central section, so that I would have a bit of leeway to adjust the placement during installation. Measurements are my nemesis- it seems that no matter how many times I measure something, I inevitably end up slightly off somewhere, and I like to give myself some safety measures so I won't have to start something over. There's nothing I detest more than having to do something over again because of a mistake I've made in measuring.
Here's an early shot of the central portion of the mural, which shows Jupiter, in the form of an eagle, swooping down to snatch the beautiful young Ganymede and bring him back to Mt Olympus to be his "cup bearer". This story, which is widely seen as an allegory for homosexual love, has been depicted thousands of times in art, going all the way back to the Greeks. In this picture you can see my sketches on the left, and a painted maquette I did for it on the right side.
This is how it turned out in the end. The putti I borrowed from Tiepolo; the upper one holds the cup that will later be Ganymede's. The smaller roundels, which you can see in the upper photo, each had depictions of various Roman gods, and were surrounded by ornament painted to look like carved plaster on a colored background, as Wedgwood or Adams might have done. Because the ground was skewed to give the illusion of a vaulted ceiling, each piece had to be drawn custom and transferred to the canvas. My method is to draw the ornament on tracing paper, then to trace it to the back side of the paper (cleaning up the lines as I go) then flip it back over and rub the drawing from the front with a bone burnisher to transfer it to the painting area. Here's a drawing for part of the ornament surrounding the roundels.
After the center was done I did the strips of border (I'd do it all at once, but my studio isn't that big.) The portrait busts on the window side of the room all have up lighting to reflect how they would look in natural light, so they look a bit spooky.
Once the border was done I brought it all up there, and with the help of almost every single person at the house (including the housekeeper and the owner!) we got it up and aligned properly. I was actually off by about two inches in my measurement of the length, but because I had planned ahead and had room to spare on the borders, it was unnoticeable. After it was up and set for a few days, I filled the seams between the center and the borders, then added an antiquing glaze, sanded the whole thing to bring it some age, and finally varnished with a matt varnish. Here's how it looked installed:
Epilog: after this ceiling had been installed for a few months, my clients heard water running late one night and came downstairs to find that a rat had chewed through a sink hose in the kitchen, which is directly above this room, and that a large amount of water had seeped through the floor and formed numerous bubbles behind the surface of this mural. We're talking 4 foot diameter bubbles that probably contained a gallon or two of water each! The parquet flooring was the more immediate problem, and we decided to see if (after draining it) the ceiling would dry out on its own and tighten up. Not the case! They came home from a trip to find the mural, with half of the drywall still attached to it, lying across the top of the furniture in the room. After removing the part that was still glued to the ceiling, I began the laborious task of getting all the drywall, paper, paint and wallpaper paste off the back side so I could reattach it once they had repaired the ceiling. It took a great deal of soaking and scraping to get it all off, but in the end, it made me feel very confident about the longevity of the technique and materials I use, in that after all that abuse, I lost very little of the actual paint work of the mural, and it didn't even shrink enough to make much of a difference at all. In fact, I think the end result was an improvement, as I added a small molding to the edge of the border that makes the trompe l'oeil even stronger.
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