Losing Your Marbles Has Some Advantages
Poor Michelangelo. No way to make a quick buck. Nothing simple. Somebody wants a ceiling, and he can’t just get away with a few roses here and a few grape leaves there. It’s the heavenly host--everyone from The Boss on down--or nothing.
And he gets a statue commission and nobody wants it done in something simple, like clay or plaster. No, it’s gotta be marble, the really good stuff. The stuff that ruins your overhead costs and weighs a ton and has to be chipped away with big hammers and chisels that look like crowbars. Sure, the result is pretty nice, but it takes a year or so. Meanwhile, the customer has marble chunks all over his carpet and Mike’s bill down at the chisel shop goes unpaid again.
Remember, now, we’re talking about marble, the variety of stone that everyone would strew all over the house if they could afford it. The rock’s rock.
People get their design ideas about marble from cathedrals, not model homes. You can just hear the gears humming when tourists walk out of St. Peter’s in the Vatican: Wouldn’t that green stuff with the white veins in it look great in the master bedroom shower? And how about those curly pillars, huh? Perfect for the pool deck.
But they settle for tile and redwood.
At least, they think, they might be able to swing a marble hearth. An elegant mantel that looks even better in the light of a soft fire. Not much to ask on a cold night.
Then the bill for around $10,000 arrives and suddenly the room feels very chilly indeed.
That’s the dollar figure Robert LaDuke came up with when asked to estimate the wholesale price of a made-from-scratch marble fireplace. But, he said, with some fairly slick trickery and about $9,200 less, he and his brother Thomas can turn your existing fireplace to something that looks more like marble than a lot of hunks of the real stuff.
Let’s say your hearth is made of plaster, is off-white, rather uninteresting and a bit chipped here and there. The Huntington Beach-based LaDukes will “prep” the surface, smoothing it out and evening up edges and lines. Then they pull out what amounts to liquid marble and set to work.
Actually, it’s paint. The LaDukes are not stonemasons and probably would be as ill at ease with a sculptor’s hammer and chisel as they would be with scalpels and hemostats. But with paints and brushes (and a few experimental items), they become camouflage artists.
The technique is called “marbleizing” and it involves nothing more than painting surfaces in such a way that the surface appears to be not plaster, or cement, but marble--complete with ranges of colors, veins, characteristic swirls and even natural imperfections. And, said Robert LaDuke, it isn’t easy.
“The difficult part,” he said, “is to get it to look like nature did it. Some things happen naturally while we’re painting, but sometimes you have to guide the paint the way you want it to go.”
When the LaDukes first began marbleizing five years ago--as an adjunct to their residential mural painting business--”there was a lot of trial and error,” said Robert. Today, he said, to obtain the proper effect, particularly in the “veining” of the ersatz marble, they may use feathers and even the edges of leaves to apply the paint.
Often, he said, gravity does much of the work, causing the paint to flow in a way that parallels the natural flow of marble veins, but many times the flow must be directed by the artists.
Also, said LaDuke, to get the proper feeling of depth and relief that is seen in marble, often several coats must be applied. The finish, however, need not be shiny. It can appear in combinations of more classical soft or “chalky” marble or a layered look shined to a high gloss.
The finish resists scratching, said LaDuke, because it is covered in several layers of varnish and topped off with a sealing coating of plastic. Still, he warned that it should not be cleaned with harsh abrasives or strong cleaners. Mild soap and water will do it.
Also, said LaDuke, heat from the fireplace itself shouldn’t harm the finish. What with the layers of varnish and plastic, the paint is protected from any flames that might lick around the corner, or from the stray spark.
“We haven’t had any trouble with that so far,” he said.
There is one more advantage of going with the fake marble: Nature may seldom offer perfection, but the LaDukes can. In actual cuts of marble, there are color variations between sections that often show up side by side when the slabs are applied to a surface. Also, the slabs are cut at random; there is little likelihood of a vein pattern continuing from one piece to another. When the marble comes in a paint box, however, both these problems disappear.
A final advantage for those who would sink into a black depression if their dining room ceiling caved in and cold-cocked 75% of the Junior League: paint on existing surfaces weighs substantially less than real marble. You can have a real marble ceiling if you want it, said LaDuke, but you’ll need the kind of reinforcing work they have at Candlestick Park in these post-Big One days.
And, of course, you’d need scaffolding and then pretty soon there’d be some guy up there who looks a lot like Charlton Heston in a Renaissance jerkin, speaking Italian and wondering whether to paint God with a beard or just a big mustache.
However, the current economy being what it is, he might do the job with a paint roller.
