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Abu 6x6 Zmax At Home Depot
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TOUCHED BY TILE / At Blue Slide studio, alike the simplest allotment is handled about 30 times
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For inspiration, tilemaker Gordon Bryan doesn't accept to go actual far. His collapsed in Point Reyes Station overlooks aureate hills area beasts graze. Back not working, he can be begin birding, gardening, surfing or on his 22-foot fishing boat. So it's not hasty that the cow, the black-headed grosbeak, the oak leaf, the willow and the herring accept all begin their way into his handmade tiles.
"That is Gordon's thing," says his wife and business partner, Pamela Bridges, who helps with the company's books and serves as her husband's capital critic. "He is Mr. Outdoors. He loves nature. He can be out surfing and get some of his inspiration."
The couple, who accept been calm 25 years, accept been in business about as long. They founded Blue Slide Art Asphalt in Humboldt County in 1982 and accept been in Point Reyes aback 1986. In 2001, they confused their asphalt authoritative from a busy barn to a adapted Chevron oil annex they broadcast into a 3,200-square-foot collapsed in Point Reyes Station.
From a one-man operation that awash tile-topped tables mostly to ancestors and friends, Blue Slide has developed into a nationally broadcast artisanal firm. Bryan estimates that alike the simplest asphalt is affected at atomic 30 times.
"Their artefact is absolutely handmade," says Brian Flynn, admiral of Hagan Flynn, a asphalt and accouterments exhibit in Los Angeles. "Blue Slide absolutely cuts anniversary asphalt by hand. They administer all the glazes by duke appliance brushes. As a result, they accept a absolutely altered attending that added tilemakers accept not been able to replicate."
Blue Slide tiles can be begin forth the waterlines of pools in Santa Barbara (fish and frog capacity are popular) and in the kitchens and bathrooms of Manhattan, area the company's white, ellipsoidal alms tiles are favorites.
Even the about simple alms asphalt has an ambrosial irregularity, absolutely altered from the constant automated array begin in the cavern tunnels of Gotham. For Bryan, the ultimate claiming is to actualize an "elegant handmade" product.
"I am aggravating to run a accomplished line," he adds, "so the tiles do not attending too handmade or too manufactured."
Bryan, 47, came to asphalt authoritative via accomplished art. Afterwards belief painting at UC Berkeley, he was accustomed into the accomplished art master's amount affairs at Yale University. But he absitively adjoin it.
"I accomplished that actuality a accomplished artisan appropriate so abundant personality and self-promotion and had annihilation to do with how acceptable you were," he said. "I absolutely admired the abstraction of craft, of art actuality in the home."
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After acquirements the basics of ceramics at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Bryan apprenticed at an artisanal asphalt aggregation in Albany, N.Y. The firm's buyer had abstruse the ability at the Moravian Pottery and Asphalt Works in Doylestown, Pa., founded by Henry Chapman Mercer, a hero of the Arts and Crafts movement in America.
Mercer founded the works out of a abhorrence that the Industrial Revolution would cede the techniques acclimated in handmade ceramics extinct. Mercer advised all the handmade tiles his close produced from 1898 until his afterlife in 1930.
Bryan considers Mercer his greatest influence. Like Mercer's, Bryan's tiles are aggressive by bounded flora and fauna. Bryan favors the English appearance of asphalt making, as did Mercer, that depicts motifs in aloft abatement rather than paint. In fact, Bryan's techniques are not abundant altered from Mercer's -- save for the addition of computer-operated kilns.
The action begins as a assignment on paper. Bryan sketches in pencil, afresh carves his architecture into adobe and has a adhesive casting fabricated from it. Such molds are acclimated to accomplish the adorning tiles, one allotment of the company's production. Blue Slide additionally produces "field tile," the apparent aboveboard or ellipsoidal tiles acclimated to awning abundant swaths of bank or floor, forth with trims, such as the Classic Crown, a 2-inch molding. The aggregation has hundreds of molds and creates custom trim or adorning tiles on request.
Extruding and pressing
All of Blue Slide tiles are built-in of clay. The aggregation orders about 4 accoutrements of the gray mix about every three weeks from a Los Angeles factory.
Wrapped in 25-pound artificial bags, the wet admixture is placed in an extruder, which Bryan describes as a "giant Play-Doh machine." One of Bryan's hand-cut dies is placed at the end. The adobe is pushed through the die and fabricated into a collapsed sheet.
One contempo Saturday morning, Pedro Mejia smoothed the area with a trowel, afresh acclimated a wood-and-brass cutter Bryan crafted to cut out assorted shapes -- 3-by-6-inch and 2-by-2-inch tiles.
Field tiles are placed on dehydration racks that band a wall. Because adobe tends to bastardize as it dries, anniversary asphalt is angled aback by hand.
Decorative tiles charge be arresting afore drying. Appliance a acute apparatus fabricated at a Humboldt auto shop, Mejia imprints the tiles with molds of bay account and lotus branches, one of dozens of motifs Bryan has designed, from sunflowers to a bother jumping in and out of bouncing waves.
Firing
Workers bland the asperous edges of the asphalt with a blot or their fingers afore the tiles are broiled in one of seven kilns. Here, the unpainted ceramic, or greenware, is ample and accursed at assorted temperatures depending on the admeasurement and blazon of tile. The action can booty 24 hours with temperatures activity up to about 2,000 degrees.
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Glazing
Fired and unpainted tiles, accepted as bisque, are brought into the coat room, area they are corrective in one of the company's 90 colors fabricated by accumulation two to four layers of paint. Baudelio Martinez is authoritative WSM 253, a matte gray-brown fabricated up of three colors. Bryan tends to do best of the glazing, back he isn't developing new designs or bushing in area needed.
"Every appliance is activity to be different," Bryan says, as he watches Martinez. "There are abounding variables, from how blubbery the acrylic is to who is applying it. We are aiming for handmade consistency."
The corrective tiles are accursed afresh for nine hours, extensive a best of 2,000 degrees, at which time the kilns about-face off and air-conditioned down, which takes an added 12 hours.
Because the duke is so complex in production, Blue Slide is expensive. Acreage asphalt costs about $30 a aboveboard foot; adorning tiles ambit from $10 to $30 each. A bath adjustment can booty four to six weeks to fill.
Naturally, the couple's 1911 Craftsman-style home, which is walking ambit from the studio, has become a advertise for their articles as able-bodied as a laboratory. The bathroom, for example, appearance abounding hand-carved tiles, including a Phoebe bird (named afterwards the couple's 14-year-old daughter) and baptize Lily (named afterwards the couple's 11-year-old daughter). In the kitchen, tiles depicting cows, pigs and sheep band the backsplash, while blooming acreage tiles awning counters.
At Toby's Feed Barn, the affection of this funky, beachside town, the brace stops to audit a accessible bath actuality outfitted in Blue Slide tiles. Apparent acreage tiles are belted by Lotus annex adorning tiles. Both are a anemic chicken as bendable and abashed as a watercolor.
"When you put the asphalt on a wall, it is added than the sum of its parts," Bryan says. "It absolutely is like a jigsaw, a put-together sculpture."
Despite his career change, Bryan concluded up bearing accomplished art afterwards all.
The Asphalt Heritage Foundation, headquartered in Healdsburg, was founded in 1987 as a nonprofit alignment "dedicated to announcement an acquaintance and acknowledgment of bowl surfaces" in the United States. The foundation sells celebrated asphalt catalogs and asphalt books and publishes an anniversary ability agenda that includes asphalt artisans, manufacturers and preservationists beyond the country. The foundation offers casual walking tours of asphalt sites in city Oakland and the Marina District in San Francisco. For advice on tours, e-mail foundation@tileheritage.org. For advice on the foundation, appointment www.tileheritage.org.
Henry Chapman Mercer's assignment lives on at the Moravian Pottery and Asphalt Works in Doylestown, Pa., which offers ceramist apprenticeships and asphalt workshops. For added information, alarm (215) 345-6722 or appointment www.buckscounty.org/departments/tileworks.
"Henry Chapman Mercer and the Moravian Pottery and Asphalt Works," by Cleota Reed (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), is advised the absolute assignment on Mercer, one of the arch abstracts of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.
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Information on California's addition to the art asphalt movement can be begin in "California Tile: The Aureate Era 1910-1940: Hispano-Moresque to Woolenius" (Schiffer, 2004). The book is edited by Joseph A. Taylor, a affiliate of the Asphalt Heritage board.
The Blue Slide Art Asphalt Web armpit is www.blueslidearttile.com. Retailers accommodate Navarra Architecture in San Francisco, Flower Power in Point Reyes Station, the Craftsman Home in Berkeley, Asphalt Source in Palo Alto, and Asphalt and Stone Concepts in Walnut Creek and San Rafael.
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