The Crafty Bee: November 2011

I hope you all enjoyed learning about vinegar graining with our recent box project. It’s totally possible to do a very cool wood graining decoration on top of the box, too. In this project, however, we wanted to accomplish two more things: show off another American art form and show what New England looks like to someone who lives very far away in a place known for weird volcanic formations and caves. (Full disclosure: It turned out that Deniz was from Australia and the picture we painted looked like the farms back home. But she loved it anyway and when we went back to her office to ask about the Turkish bath’s hours, she had it displayed on a shelf behind her desk. In the cave office.)

Diane's Rufus Porter-inspired landscape.

Here’s some history about Rufus Porter (1792-1884) and his art. According to the museum’s website, he was an “artist, musician, teacher, inventor, and founder of Scientific American.” He started out as a portrait painter and itinerant muralist. Houses in New England, especially around Maine where he was from, still have the wall murals of farm and coast landscapes. There’s more on the site about his inventions (the revolving rifle, which he sold to Samuel Colt, for instance) and things he started (Scientific American magazine in 1845). He’s a very interesting guy with his fingers in an awful lot of pots.

Now here’s another interview with our talented guest artist, Diane Glim (aka Mom).

CB: Tell us how you learned about Rufus Porter and what drew you to his work?

MOM: I have always admired early 19th painted scenes, usually found in Federal period homes. Since I live in a house that was built in 1810, I was thinking about learning how to paint some of my walls. After assessing our hallway, and its height, I decided to take some courses on painting these murals. In class, we worked on canvas or boards and I decided to do some paintings in that style and line our stairway with them. Much easier than climbing up ladders.

CB: Primitive painting is actually a lot harder than it looks. It’s really easy to come up with something that’s embarrassingly dorky. Where did you learn to do this?

MOM: I took several courses at Fletcher Farm School of Crafts in Ludlow, Vt. Rufus Porter's murals are soft and ethereal, so it’s hard to get that feeling. While primitive painting is wonderful (think of Grandma Moses) it has a different feel. Rufus Porter usually has a body of water, several land forms, some boats, and houses, and trees. He uses five distinct planes to show depth and almost always has a large softly down tree right in the front.

Here are the materials we’re using:

Acrylic paints
Paper towels
Palette knife
Small paint brushes
Glass jar
Palette or make your own: plastic take out container, some damp paper towels and a sheet of butcher paper on top
Polyurathane spray
Pretty scrapbook paper
Adhesive spray
A pencil
Scissors

1. The first step is to set up your paints. We already primed the surface when we painted a base coat on the box. Now we have to set up our paint so we can mix the colors.

2. You could use a fancy pants palette if you have one, but why not be extra crafty and make your own? We used a plastic container from some take-out – one of those nice big rectangular ones that they completely fill with Pad Thai even though the in-house serving size is never that big. I also use these for drying and storing steel shot for my jewelry tumbler. They’re probably good for a million other things, too. But I can’t list them here because now I’m completely focused on Pad Thai and I’m supposed to be explaining how we made this painting.

3. Okay, here’s the palette. A layer of damp paper towel with a layer of butcher paper (or wax paper) on top. It’s cool because you can’t spill because the sides are too high.

4. You actually don’t need a million colors. To make the sky we’re using yellow oxide, cobalt blue, Hooker’s green, and antique white. We mix it with a palette knife and just keep adjusting until we get the color just right. The color, of course, is all about mood and preference. Is it a sunshine day? (Yes, that is a Brady Bunch reference. This is about Americana, remember?). Is a storm brewing? (Rufus Porter did a lot of seascapes.) Then paint it on.

5. Then we painted in some wispy clouds with a fan brush. It took a couple of tries to get it exactly right. It should look like nice wispy clouds, not big white cheese doodles in the sky. (Hungry again.)

6. Next, put in your block of land. We’re doing a Vermont farm, so no water. We used raw sienna, Hooker’s green, and black, plus a bit of antique white and yellow, and cadmium red as needed to get different shades of green for variation, and also some dirt because in Vermont a lot of the roads on not paved. At this point you want to decide where the sun is so that you can do the areas where sunlight would hit lighter than the parts that are in shade.

7. Next we start putting in trees and buildings. Again, remember where the sun hits and lighten accordingly. The houses are basically little monopoly houses with the sunny side lighter. Black for the roof and windows, colors for the sides of the house. Often Rufus Porter would make a few wispy trees like these here. (link) We also used his technique for light houses (vertical stripes of lighter and darker shades of the same hue) to make the silo.

8. Rufus Porter hand-painted a lot of what he did, but he also used stamps to add some elements. That’s why you see a lot of exactly the same house or cow in his murals. We’re working on way too small a surface for that here so we hand-painted everything. And actually, you’ll see some of the animals are really just a collection of dots that hint at a sheep or a cow or a chicken.

9. Another thing Rufus Porter did was have a special symbol as his signature. His was always a man in a boat. This is my second box made under my mom’s close tutelage, and I’ve chosen for both a fox terrier as my signature. Because Annie, my fox terrier, is awesome.

10. Okay, so after a bunch of painting and re-painting by both of us, we finally have a finished illustration that we’re happy with.

11. The next step is to let it dry (fast –we’re using acrylics) and then spray it with some nice, easy-to-use polyurethane. We did this outside so as not to make a big mess.

12. The last step is to line the box. It’s a keepsake box, after all, so the inside should be nice. You can use fabric, the anti-tarnish material that’s used for jewelry, or paper. For this project I used some paper from my scrapbooking paper collection (by the way, I’m not a scrapbooker, but stay tuned for some other cool uses!). I picked a design that reminds me of the early 1800s, which tend to be small, delicate patterns. I picked red because back then people were very about the barn red dyes imported from, you guessed it, Turkey! They called it Turkey Red and you saw Turkey Red everything – fabric, shawls, rugs, …. Well, it seemed fitting.