Hemingway à Paris

Ooo la la, I have Paris on my mind.  I recently finished reading "The Paris Wife", (which I highly recommend).  The book is about Hemingway and his time in Paris and Europe with his 1st wife.  

I  bought the dresser for a bargain ($15).  It actually had the most paint in one color I have ever seen.  I am guessing there were at least 2 gallons of white on this thing.  And, it had some kind of green toxic sludge adhered to the pulls. I think the previous owner was experimenting with a chemical reaction that went bad and it ended up on the pulls....

Anyhow, I saw past the gook and imagined a rugged, but elegant dresser, solid lines, but with a touch of softness as well.

Try as I might, I could not find "before photos of the dresser, or the toxic sludge, but it looked something like this:

 

No matter what I tried, it wasn't budging, I had to bring in the big guns.

 After a 24 hour bath in the paint stripper, a really thorough scrubbing with a wire brush, and finally a good rinse.....I spray painted the pulls silver, then heavily distressed them with Steel Wool.  I added Chrystal knobs to the top drawer to soften it a bit.

 I did the body of the piece in ASCP "Coco", and the drawers in ASCP "Paris Grey".  I made a glaze of black colorant, very watered down and went over the drawers, then went over them again with a warm brown glaze, I did the same for the body of the dresser.

Although this was a tough piece to complete, I don't think I worked on it nearly as much as Hemingway did to complete "The Sun Also Rises".  If you want to know about that story, and how it relates to "The Paris Wife", see HERE.

If Hemingway were still around, hopefully he would have a piece of furniture that looked something like this one:

 

To sum it all up, yep, this dresser was a labor of sweat, toil, and very dried out hands.  But in the words of Hemingway....... "A man can be destroyed but not defeated"

I thought I might destroy this piece at one point, it was such a pain, but I didn't let it defeat me, and good thing I didn't!  Thanks Ernest. 

 

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