How hot is Marbeling and Woodgraining over there?

[erik winkler]

Since the Dutch forests have been cut down during the middleages and all the used wood sincethen had to be imported from abroad, wood has been expensive in the Netherlands.
The Dutch tradition of painting on oak panels, making great kabinet and ships for the VOC (United East Indies Company) made the wood scares and much in demand.
Therefore we had a tradition of painting wood on all sorts of media.
Furthermore we live on mud and reclaimed land and have no base material like stone, let alone marble.
If a house had to be buil, it was baked mud, so every stone in our ancient houses are like a piece of earthenware pottery.
You could say that the building of houses was an immense undertaking and again very expensive.
Therefore there is a second tradition of painting marble paterns on the building media's.

Since the 1900's this tradition has been fading away and allmost died out.
Untill 1950 marbeling and woodgraining were standard in the painting school curiculum.
Nowadays only a few are true masters in this trade, most of them are pensioners who did this kind of work their whole life.

I recently signed myself up for a 14 week course in these arts and were wandering how was and are these special crafts in your country?

[Roderick Treece]

Eric,
I love the Euroupean tradition of decorative painting on the outside of buildings. That really isn't done here much. Marbeling(faux finishing and wood grain have been very popular withing the last 25 years with the boom years having happened about 20 years ago. If you look up "The Elizabeth O'neill school" and The Day Studio" you can trace the beginings of the modern Faux finishing movement in the USA. In my opinion Joanna Day , owner of the Day Studio was the person who brought the art of decorative painting back into vouge in the US. Today you can find alot of places that offer classes.
Years ago faux finishing was my main business but because of compitition and lowering prices I never do it anymore.

[erik winkler]

Roderick,

I am very interested in the paterns you did. Here the market is very marginal nowadays, but I love to hang out with these old guys who did their jobs for decades. They also teach handlettering and gilding, maybe I hear some new details of approach and recipies.
Besides the interesting studies, the place where I will be thought is very interessting; it contains the biggest liberary in Dutch books about decorative painting, glass treatments, handlettering and typical old Dutch fonts. I searched on their online catalog and found many titels I would treasure.
Here two links:

Old Techniques page translated to English
Old Painting Techniques page translated to English
Courses page translated to English

Erik

[Anthony Bennett]

Hi Erik,
those liinks are in a non english language. do you have a translation please?

[erik winkler]

Oops made a mistake, with this link you could browse through the site in English:

Translation

Erik

[vance galliher]

Eric, it could be me, ......but the "translation" doesn't seem to work.....

[erik winkler]

Erik with a K here,

Strange, when i press on the link it redirects me to the google translate websie which translates all the written text into English.
Maybe best to copy the url and paste it into google translate yourself. Seems that my browser is installed for Dutch users....

Erik