Another Friday, this one I leave early

Not to ruin the point of the story with the subject line but I got out of there an hour early for the sake of my sanity, which though relieved initially, finds itself (as I find myself) at risk of losing it again. Regardless, how did I leave early with no repercussions? I'll tell you, simply, that I lied my way out of that place. The ease with which I just made up utter fabrications and confidently just walked out surprised even me. I guess it's a knack.

Anything is possible after two and half hours of sleep before work. Ugh.

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.

Work more interesting than before

On the Fridays I work more people don't than do. Normally this means I can choose the radio station or CD's, get a lot done with no distractions and take frequent and necessary breaks. Joyce was there on Friday, in the lab. She complimented the music playing, Zoe Keating, and I said I'd make her a copy.

The noon whistle rang and I went out to the car, moved it to a less conspicuous parking spot and smoked, ate my lunch and listened to the national and regional news from NPR. It was warm so I stepped outside to walk along the banks of where the Hudson meets the Mohawk. Mud and gooseshit caked my shoes as I examined beaver gnawings. I ate a pear and threw the core into the river for some gulls, but they didn't like it. I figured they would because they always fight over the apple cores. Whatever, stupid birds.

Back in the car I put in some eye drops and listened to unmemorable things, then went back inside to the lab. Joyce came in almost immediately and asked if I wanted to take some cross-sections. What kind of question is that, I thought, and said "Absolutely." The results were staggering, sort of.

Here's the breakdown of what most would consider the layers in a gilded chair: Gold on bole on gesso on wood. In this cross-section though there was a fabric layer under the gesso. Joyce was baffled. I had noticed the funny black stuff on the chair near the joints, even had seen a weird checkered pattern, but formulated my own explanation for it. Fabric of any kind was not part of it.

We called in an expert, Allison from Textiles down the hall. Under the low power microscope she deemed the fabric to be in a 4-2 right handed twill pattern, and under a higher powered microscope ventured a guess that the fabric was in fact silk. She took a sample and went back to her lab to run some tests, came back later with confirmation. Joyce and I speculated. Yesterday Eric suggested a technique where silk was used to bridge the gap at the mitres in frames to prevent the gesso from cracking as the wood swelled and shrunk over time. Could this also have been used in the case of these chairs?

Probably, which leads to some interesting speculation. Was the chair made by a chair-maker, then finished and gilded by a frame-maker? Or did the furniture maker also do frame making? I shall check the maker's label for more information.

One of the chairs I've been scraping on

ML.1974.129.10

everything is fiction, choose your own

Today at work I heard Eliot Spitzer's state of the state, and I was like, yO.

Cause there's one thing Eliot wants and that's reform, bitches. "You clapped for gerrymandering you sons of bitches, C'MON!" and he pulls the applause out of every son of a bitch that really gets off from gerrymandering.

I scraped on this chair for about 5.25 hours today. It was all right but I felt really restless when I got home. I'll post a picture tomorrow maybe. I might remember.