semantic debate

What do you call a group of more than two chairs? A gaggle, a flock, a clutch? After some discussion with my co-workers Anne and Mary we decided on “a shitload” which sums up my feelings of these things. It’s hard to imagine how four gilded chairs can be quantified as a shitload, but maybe it’s the shitloads of time I’ve been spending on them. Let’s check a treatment log:

8/22/06		Continued gesso fills and refining	6.0
8/23/06		Continued gesso fills	6.75
8/24/06		Continued gesso fills (legs)	6.25
8/28/06		Continued gesso fills	6.25
8/29/06		Continued gesso fills	4.25
8/31/06		Continued gesso fills	2.0
9/7/06		Continued gesso fills (legs)	2.5
9/11/06		Continued gesso fills	5.25
9/13/06		Continued gesso fills, sized back insert, began gesso fills	5.0
9/15/06		Continued gesso fills, finished back insert fills	5.75
9/18/06		Continued gesso fills	6.0
9/19/06		Continued gesso fills	6.5
9/20/06		Continued gesso fills	6.0
10/3/06		Continued gesso fills	2.5
10/4/06		Continued gesso fills	3.5
10/5/06		Continued gesso fills	2.0

Yeah, those numbers are measured in hours spent. Notice the white bits on some of them? That’s the gesso. A word about gesso: ugh. It’s hard enough matching a surface perfectly on a frame when it’s flat, but long rounded stretches of loss that need replacing take forever. I think 90 hours were allotted for the gesso repair stage and I’m probably about 30 hours over that. Is it because I’m working slow, oh no, that certainly couldn’t be the case, could it? I insist that is not so and I will blame the extra hours on the relative humidity.

A word about relative humidity related to gesso. In the past couple years there’s been a big push in the New York State historic sites to install HVAC systems to regulate heat and humidity, keeping the temp around 70 degress and the humidity right at 50%. This is a lofty goal and to my knowledge has not worked at a single site to this day. Curiously, it also doesn’t seem to work at the lab at all either. For instance, today the temp when I arrived was 70.3 F and humidity at 21%. In the summer we do pretty well with the temp, 75 F maybe, but humidity rockets upwards to 70%. Massive fluctuations have consequences, especially for wood, in this case, the wood under all that gesso which seems to have shrunk considerably since August of 2006 when the chair entered the lab. The result? Puckering gesso and thus bits falling off, necessitating another round of fills and leaving the chair about 30% new gesso, thanks to yours truly.