Brushstokes of Nature The Ancient Art of Vinegar Painting

My name is Bill Russell. I operate Bill Russell Studio. I do decorative finishing on furniture, primarily employing the vinegar paint technique, which was popular in the early 19th century in the U.S. My craft is quite old, going back maybe longer than anybody really could document. My introduction came through, as I say, reading and through my exposure to techniques that I learned at the finishing school on Long Island in New York. I would say one of the more complex aspects of this craft is really understanding the nature of the pigments that you're using. Moving the paint around on the surface, introducing air into the paint, introducing bubbles into the paint, all of these things can change the way the paint settles out and the kind of result that you get visually, which is not a brush stroke. In this kind of work, you're attempting to create surfaces that appear to be naturally occurring. And as you see, as the material dries, as the paint dries, it's going to create its own activity and it's going to take on its own pattern. I'm going to let it do that. I want it to be natural. I want it to look like I didn't do it. I want it to look like nature did it. And in fact, nature is doing it because I'm not in control of it anymore. Once I understood the nature of the process of vinegar painting, it really clicked with me. Somehow, this became the technique that was going to be my thing. I'm in love with color and so I'm always excited to be able to introduce new colors. So whether that's working with a new pigment or being motivated by something that I see in nature that is a color combination or textural combination that I haven't used before or haven't explored very deeply. So I've always got my eyes out taking photographs when I'm in the woods or out walking in nature, trying to inspire myself to think about how this might be translated into a surface for a piece of furniture. Back in the 19th century, the common name for this technique was putty painting because it was a very common material used to create the textures. And you can see that this gives a different kind of pattern from the brush. It's heavier in some places than others, but I can use this brush, which is called a badger blender, a very, very fine brush, and I can pull the colors out. But I still keep that pattern that I established with the putty. When I encountered my mentor and teacher, Ina Marks, who I studied with on Long Island, and she came to Philadelphia to speak. And this was a few years after I had taken several courses from her. And after she spoke, I approached her with some photographs of some work. And her comment was, wow, you've taken an ancient technique and brought it into the 20th century. It was still the 20th century when this happened. And I felt that was a real compliment, and I felt like if she was willing to make that comment, I was willing to accept that as being accepted into the community of, one might say, master craftsmen or something in that range. That idea that you don't need a big industrial complex behind you to do this at its very basic core is, I think, a testament to just the ingenuity of somebody finding out how to make something from what they have at hand. Some of this is just, has to be done more or less through experience. I can't tell you there's a particular formula for how thick the paint should be or how much you should apply. It's really more about a question of just trying different things until you get it to work the way that you feel comfortable with it. Now, the danger is, you keep messing around with it, messing around with it, messing around with it. After a while, it looks forced and uncomfortable. So I'll have to stop, because if I keep working on it, it's going to look like somebody was in there messing with Mother Nature, and I don't want it to look that way. If it's not 100% consistent, we're okay with that. There's no way it can be, given the nature of the material. But that's the beauty of the material, is that it takes on a life of its own once you put it onto the surface. People might have the misconception that you know everything, and nobody knows everything about anything. And so the idea there is that you're continuing to discover and continuing to learn and continuing to find out more. Once you think you know it all, and you stop learning, you're dead in the water. So mastery doesn't mean that you've reached a certain point. I think it's more about understanding how to keep moving forward. And I'm constantly looking at other people's work and trying to understand how they approach a sense of perfection. And if I can, bring their dedication into my own work. Hopefully, people will maintain it. I've taught it to a number of people. But it's up to every individual to take it and push it forward as they can. And hopefully that will continue to happen. If you really want to find something that speaks to you, and you find that you are moving in a direction, keep pushing. Find a way to just keep immersing yourself in that particular thing, which leads to a kind of mastery. Don't be deterred. Just keep doing the thing that you love. I'd say one of the most valuable things that I've learned from doing this is the ability to work with relatively unsophisticated materials. And through a combination of physical and mental activities, create something that is such a mystery to so many people.