1. Assessment and Planning

Before diving into the restoration process, it’s crucial to assess the condition of your old furniture. Examine it for any structural issues, loose joints, or missing parts. Determine the type of finish or paint it currently has. In the case of lacquer furniture, it might have a faded or damaged lacquer finish that needs attention. You may wonder how to paint over lacquer furniture? Before painting over a lacquer finish, there are several steps you must go through before applying the paint. 

2. Cleaning and Stripping

Begin by cleaning the furniture thoroughly. Use a mild detergent or wood cleaner to remove dirt, grime, and any old wax or polish. For lacquer furniture, be gentle to avoid damaging the finish further. If the lacquer is severely damaged, consider professional refinishing.

In some cases, you may need to strip the old finish. Be cautious when choosing a stripping agent, as lacquer is sensitive to certain chemicals. Consult a professional or test a small, inconspicuous area before proceeding.

3. Repairing and Sanding

Repair any structural issues, such as loose joints or missing pieces, using wood glue or appropriate adhesives. After the repairs have dried, sand the entire piece to create a smooth and even surface. Start with coarse-grit sandpaper and gradually move to finer grits to achieve the desired finish. For lacquer furniture, avoid aggressive sanding, as it can damage the delicate lacquer layer.

4. Applying a Finish

Depending on your preference and the original finish of the furniture, you can either reapply lacquer or choose a different finish. For lacquer furniture, you can purchase a clear lacquer finish suitable for wood from a home improvement store. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions for application, and make sure to apply multiple thin coats, allowing each coat to dry before applying the next. This will help achieve a smooth and glossy finish.

5. Staining or Painting

If you desire a different look, consider staining or painting your furniture. For staining, choose a color that complements your decor and apply it evenly, following the manufacturer’s guidelines. For painting, use a high-quality wood primer followed by the desired paint color. Sand lightly between coats for a smooth finish.

6. Hardware and Accessories

Don’t forget to refurbish or replace any hardware, such as knobs, handles, or hinges. New hardware can make a significant difference in the overall appearance of your piece. Consider using period-appropriate hardware for a vintage look.

7. Protecting and Maintaining

Once your furniture is restored, protect it with an appropriate finish or sealant to prevent future damage. Regularly dust and clean your furniture with a soft, damp cloth to maintain its beauty.

Now that you know how to paint over lacquer furniture, you can give it a try to breathe new life into old items around the house. Restoring old furniture, including lacquer furniture, is a gratifying endeavor that can bring a sense of history and character to your living space. 

By following these steps and paying attention to the unique requirements of lacquer finishes, you can transform worn-out pieces into stunning additions to your home decor. Remember, patience and careful attention to detail are key to achieving beautiful and lasting results in furniture restoration.

The artist was so devoted to art that even being chained to a wheelchair, he painted with a brush tied to his hand. Light colors and happy people – this is how the artist’s paintings can be described.

1. Renoir was singing in a church choir in his childhood

We make sure every time that a gifted person is good at everything. Young Renoir sang so well in the choir that his teacher predicted a great career for him, and was willing to take him to school to get a musical education. But such education was too expensive for the family of the future artist. Later, in a biography about his father, the famous director Jean Renoir noted that Pierre had an amazing talent to create, but not to perform other people’s works.

2. Renoir worked so fast that he got paid less

Parents saw his beautiful charcoal drawings on the walls and decided to send him to be an apprentice for a local porcelain artist. He showed himself as a talented worker. He mainly copied floral patterns that decorated plates and utensils. Renoir painted porcelain and worked incredibly quickly and efficiently. The owner of the workshop was both happy and upset. “Such a boy! And look at all the money he makes! ” he sighed. The master lowered the payment to the young helper and even began to pay on a piece-work basis. But still, Pierre worked so fast that he soon earned that much money the family could afford to buy a house. He was only thirteen years old then.

Pierre Auguste Renoir not only quickly painted porcelain plates. He also created his canvases in the shortest possible time. For example, a portrait painting of the famous composer Richard Wagner, he wrote a little more than half an hour.

In total, throughout his life, he painted more than a thousand paintings. And one of Renoir’s largest paintings, Luncheon Of The Boating Party, is 173 cm (68.1 inches in) long and 130 cm (51.2 inches in) wide.

3. Monet and Renoir – the same landscape paintings

Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir were friends. They met in the workshop of the Swiss artist Charles Glair when they were preparing to enter the prestigious school of fine arts. At one time they worked hard side by side. As a result, their paintings are very similar and often even display the same places.

Take, for example, pictures of The Frog Pond (La Grenouillere). Don`t you think it`s a strange name for the painting? So-called small islands on the water for the rest of the representatives of the working class. There were cafes, boat stations, and spa complexes. This place was not called “frog pond” because of the frogs on the river. “Frogs” referred to young ladies who spent summer Sundays on these islands and enjoyed SPA procedures in the company of their courageous partners.

In 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent a couple of months here together creating their famous paintings. They display the same figures, but in different techniques and colors. Renoir depicted many details. And Monet’s technique had a lot of repeating details, for example, folds on the water, similar swimmers and completely merging trees. And he paid little attention to the figures of people. Just take a look at these two.

4. Renoir lived to his old age because he saved another person`s life

When Renoir was in his 30, he was standing and painting on the banks of the Seine River. At that time, he was spotted by representatives of the ruling radical government. They decided that the artist was a French spy. But they didn’t drown him in the river right there, as they had used to do, but brought him to the local town hall to shoot him later. This delay couldn’t save him much. However, a wonderful coincidence happened. There was the leader of the commune in the town hall, who recognized Renoir. The fact is that a few years before these events, Renoir saved this man’s life when he was dying of hunger and needed shelter. So, this man vouched for Renoir and he was released.

5. Married his model

Renoir was always surrounded by women who loved and admired him. “The streets of our cities are now full of Renoirs: girls, children with a sincere look”, said the famous film director and son of the artist, Jean Renoir.

Renoir found his love among his models. He was already about 40 years old when he met a dressmaker, Aline Charigot, 20 years younger than the artist. She was a chubby, pink, full-bodied, with reddish-blond hair and she was the ideal of Auguste Renoir. She became his main model and life partner. They had three children and lived together until the death of Charigot.

Once a friend of Renoir was wondering why he looked with adoration at his furry wife. And the artist said people stop seeing each other when they grow old together. Wrinkles and fatness disappear.

6. Renoir was a lover of women

Speaking of fatness. The hand of the master loved to portray magnificent, full of life energy young ladies. Critics announced Renoir as the greatest female painter among contemporaries. Gradually, male figures disappeared from his canvases. Paintings became a world of women exclusively, more and more youthful and joyful, as can be seen from the later “The Large Bathers”. Renoir’s passion for an ideal motivated him to create a unique female type, a synthesis of a Montmartre girl with laughing eyes, a strong peasant woman from Champagne, and models of Ingres, Fragonard, and Titian.

7. A fact that everyone will like. Renoir loved cats

In many paintings of Renoir, you can see cats. Often such paintings symbolized motherhood and sensuality. “Cats are the only women worth talking about. They are the most fun to write,” said Renoir.

In his sunset years, the artist’s health deteriorated and often he painted in the company of cats, which helped him keep warm by resting on his lap.

Thanks to such co-authorship, the Institut Pasteur in Paris was even able to confirm the authenticity of a painting of his late years. The presence of cat hair was detected in its paint.

Glory has found its genius

The fame and universal recognition came to Renoir only in the last years of his life. In 1917 the painting “Umbrellas” was exhibited at the London National Gallery and hundreds of letters poured out on the artist. People congratulated Renoir on the success: “From the moment we saw your picture along with the works of old masters, we were delighted that our contemporary took his rightful place in European painting.”

Renoir continues to get on the pages of the newspaper even in the 21st century. In 2009, a woman bought a painting for $7 at a flea market. Later it turned out that “Landscape on the Banks of the Seine” belongs to the brush of Renoir and is valued between $75,000 and $100,000.

For a long time now, canvas boards have been exclusively known as the real artists tool -predominately aimed at the more adult and professional of artists when painting. So, you can only imagine my astonishment when I walked into the art room of this school to find a wall adorned with children’s painted canvas boards.

I had to ask, out of sheer curiosity, how the children could do so much work on such expensive tools? Yet it appears that in recent years, so many discounted and bargain basement stores and departments have been selling canvas boards at hugely reduced prices – which have also somehow now made it into the children’s sections.

Intrigued at this, I ventured out for myself to find out about accessing cheap canvas boards and, sure enough, the school were right. For less than the price of a skinny latte, anyone can purchase a decent sized canvas board for drawing or paining on, and this gave me a further idea.

Opening a Canvas Club

Hyped by the inspiration and surge of stunning art work on display, I approached the school about the possibilities of running an after-school arts club, where all interested kids could concentrate on creating their own canvas masterpieces week by week, aided by my help and that of a local artist currently training at the nearby University.

A few weeks later, and with a maximum of ten children per session, the school agreed to my proposal and we now have a waiting list for future sessions! How, I was asked by a friend, can the school afford to fund such an event? Quite simply, all interested children come in with their own canvas boards! Not only does this keep the costs at a minimal level, but I’ve noticed that each child displays more responsibility towards their work when they know that the canvas belongs to them.

In future, I am hoping to put together a twice-yearly show, where by all locals, teachers and parents can view a selection of canvas boards in a temporary gallery, whilst bidding for their favourite to raise further funds for the children’s sessions.

All Children Can Be Artists

All it took was a little understanding that children want to be able to create what they see many adults create on a canvas board. That, plus the acquired knowledge that canvas boards are as cheap as chips in many stores, and we now have the beginnings of a wonderful club – which I know will continue to grow in popularity.

Who knows, we may just discover the next Van Gogh in our midst!

Our February visitors will be coming in the form of a painting. It normally hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, but will travel to England for the first time. Pretty much everyone will know it because this is the iconic American Gothic; a bald, pitchfork-wielding farmer stands beside a puritanical woman (his daughter perhaps, or his wife?) in front of their little, white-painted, wooden-slatted house. It has become one of the most familiar — and parodied — images in 20th-century American art.

Its creator, Grant Wood, travelling round his home state of Iowa, was struck by the architecture of a small clapboard homestead. Its gothic-style windows seemed to him somehow absurd. And so, using his sister and his dentist as his models, he set out to imagine “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house”.

At first Iowans were furious to find themselves represented as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers”. One farmer’s wife threatened to bite off Wood’s ear. Another wanted to “bash his head in”. But Wood painted this image in 1930, the year after the Wall Street Crash, and, as the Great Depression dug in ever deeper, it came to be interpreted as an emblem of a nation’s steadfast pioneering spirit.

It is in this role that the painting will star in America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Royal Academy. This exhibition (February 25-June 4) brings American Gothic together with a host of other seminal loans and offers a picture of a nation in upheaval. Economic devastation and social change, the show will suggest, gave rise to an era of vital creativity. Here is a show to put one optimistic slant upon the year of struggle that lies ahead.

What they say
The gothic window is “a vanishing point in more than one sense. Family secrets, dead bodies, incest, and murder all haunt this work, and they enter the painting here.” R Tripp Evans, biographer of Wood

“All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” Grant Wood

In the forthcoming film Mr Turner there is a scene where Joseph Mallord William Turner walks up to his painting in the Royal Academy and spits on it. Top-hatted figures look on, aghast in the way that only top-hatted figures in films can be aghast.

“He’s grandstanding,” says the modern artist Tim Wright, “but Turner did do that. There are all sorts of technical reasons why you might use a bit of spit. Spit is a fixer, it creates an emulsion, can help you get paint to stick on paint . . . ” His list peters out, but you get the idea. Spit is useful stuff.

Wright knows all about spit, and about Turner because he is the man who taught JMW Turner to paint. Or rather he is the man who taught Timothy Spall, who plays Turner in Mike Leigh’s new film, to paint like Turner. A bit. Wright is himself a National Portrait Gallery-exhibited artist, but the sort of softly spoken one who wears his knowledge lightly and a jumper with cat hairs on it and says: “It would be arrogant to suggest I could turn someone into a genius like him.”

Nevertheless, for the past two years Turner, in the guise of Spall, turned up unpaid at Leigh’s request for two days each week at Wright’s concrete and white-walled studio in Clerkenwell, north London . There, from 10am to 5pm with a break for lunch, he learnt how to become like the erratic, revolutionary Turner. Spall, who had previously only done art A-level, was, says Wright, “always on time. Very enthusiastic.”

By the end of the two years, Spall could turn out a pretty good Turner. A copy he did of Turner’s famous Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, while not perfect (“I don’t think we’re in the business of faking Turners”) was, says Wright, pretty good. “As a painting it stands up.” Those paintings you see in the final film are therefore a mixture of ones that have been specially painted by artists, or Turner prints that have been overlaid with a layer of clear paint to give them realistic-looking texture.

Wright’s involvement began when Leigh asked him out of the blue to have a meeting,then “turned up here with Timothy Spall”. The painter hadn’t until then known what to expect because Leigh, who often doesn’t tell actors what will happen to them in his films until it is happening, “wouldn’t say what it was”. While Leigh explained his plan, “I was looking at Tim, and Tim was looking at me and we were mutually thinking: ‘We’ve got to get on; we’ve got to spend all this time together.’ ”

Contemporary critics of Turner would have felt that it was an easy enough task to teach someone to paint like him. In the film there is a scene that shows a music hall sketch, based on a historical one, that suggests that you can create a Turner painting by throwing jam tarts at a canvas. His work was described by some at the time as little more than “eggs and spinach” or “soapsuds and whitewash”. Another critic said: “Turner seems to have taken leave of form altogether.”

Presumably Wright was relieved that Leigh didn’t want to make a film called Mr Canaletto, say, or Mr Hieronymus Bosch? Not so. Painting like Turner is “not all that”, he says, making a swooshy painting gesture with his hand. “If you look at his paintings they are extremely delicate. Everyone thinks he’s just chucking thick paint and he’s not. It’s lots of washes of translucent paint. Turner is a very subtle painter; it’s all veils and mists and vapours. It’s not all show-off expressionism.”

Spall’s lessons in painting like Turner were essentially those that the autodidact artist would have himself gone through but compressed into a two-year course rather than a lifetime. So perspective, colour theory, watercolour painting, oil painting, life painting and, inadvertently, a little bit about taxidermy (mainly: don’t use the taxidermist Wright used. Having bought a rabbit for Spall to paint they realised that it “had been stuffed with the Daily Express. God, it started to stink . . . ”).

So how do you learn to paint like Turner? Unfortunately for Wright, you don’t get much guidance from the man himself. In the film Turner is portrayed as someone who grunts more than he speaks; taciturn to the point of porcine. In real life Turner was, says Wright, not much more forthcoming. “He didn’t say a lot.” What he did say was broad-brush to say the least. “The famous one is: ‘The Sun is God,’ ” which, while it has a certain appealing Turnerish dash to it certainly isn’t as useful as, say, “Take a sharp HB pencil and . . .”

Wright therefore had to look, not to Turner’s words, but to his work to understand how he painted. Much in the way that a da Vinci or a Battista would study the stripped-down layers of a body — skeleton, écorchéd muscles, skin — to understand how to paint it, so Wright looked at the stripped-down sections of unfinished Turners to understand how to paint them: at the underlying skeleton of sketches, then at the overlaid tissue of the washes, then the final flesh and body of the picture. “You see how he’s built up layers and what he’s thinking.”

Pictures are worth, as the saying has it, quite a lot of words. Wright and Spall were allowed into the Tate archives and handled sketches that Turner had drawn when he was 17. “You can see how he holds a pen, how he holds a brush because you can see the mark. It’s intimate.” Not only intimate but informative; from these Wright could almost reverse-engineer not just the drawing technique but the man himself. “You can interpret from a mark what the arm was doing. Once you get that you’re getting an idea about the person.”

In the entirety of the film there are probably, Wright estimates only “ten, fifteen” minutes in which you see Turner actually painting. Did that need two years of lessons? Can you tell the difference between an actor standing in front of an easel and an actor trained as an artist doing the same? “I’d like to think you could,” says Wright. “A lot of films have got very bad painting in them: they use the brush like they’re writing. The point was to get him inside the head of an artist so he behaved like one on screen. I think it’s something to do with Tim’s ease in his studio.” He looks faintly amused. “It’s a subtle point, isn’t it?”

So then, how do you paint like Turner? Wright’s advice is not much more precise than Turner’s. It isn’t, he says, about using a special method of drawing (“There is no technical secret about it”) or using special paints (“it could be a Biro”) but instead about how you look at things. “The secret,” says Wright, “is learning how to see. Turner observed the natural world; most of us just scan it.”

To that end, if you want to learn how to paint like Turner Wright’s advice is nothing to do with paints or paper or technique. Instead he suggests that you “get yourself a dead rabbit”, adding, like a cookery writer conceding that you can substitute sour cream for crème fraîche, “or a dead mouse”.

The next step is positioning it. “Don’t just put it on a table because you will be careless about looking at it. Hang it from a nail on the wall by a string. Stand back six feet. Have a good look at it. Don’t take what you’re looking at for granted.” And to avoid the problems they had with the rabbit — which, though it had a certain Georgian vérité to it, was also quite gross — remember to take it down when you’re done.

It wasn’t just Spall who came to his studio to learn how to paint for the film. Leigh sent all the artists he cast along to Wright. His studio became a sort of Valhalla of Victorian art with Turner’s great friend Clarkson Stanfield, Pickersgill and even Constable down there. Constable was apparently “great. Very good at drawing.” Even Leigh himself came along. He was “a very careful draughtsman. Quite meticulous.” He painted not with a dramatic sweep but, says Wright, with “accretions of detail”. Which, once you’ve seen the film Turner, makes pleasing sense.

Despite some initial trepidation at taking on such an odd project, Wright and Spall “got on very well”. Does Wright think that the Turner who Spall created was a convincing one? “I had a very strange experience once,” he says. “We were having lunch and I looked up at him and he looked just like this portrait of Turner. He sort of transformed . . . I said to Mike the next time I saw him,‘This strange thing happened . . .’ and Mike said: ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s what’s called acting’.”

Acting the expert:

Piano Playing Geoffrey Rush for Shine (1996) Determined to do without a hand double, Rush learnt the fingering for Rachmaninov’s famously fiendish version of Flight of the Bumblebee. It looked perfect, though it didn’t necessarily sound it. “I used to stuff a blanket into the piano because the racket was just shocking,” Rush said.

Butchery Daniel Day-Lewis for Gangs of New York (2002)
Day-Lewis had previously got his hands bloody spending three years learning how to box for The Boxer (his trainer Barry McGuigan, the former world featherweight champion, said he was good enough to go professional). For his role as a cleaver-wielding gang leader in Scorsese’s 19th-century drama he learnt butchery — and how to seem more than a little sinister: he reportedly sharpened his knives between takes.

Horseriding
Tobey Maguire for Seabiscuit (2003)
A stern diet, an equicizer (which, if it has yet to appear in your local gym, is a mechanical horse) and a former champion jockey were all needed to get Maguire into shape for his role as Depression-era jockey. Not to mention a bit of old-fashioned grit and determination: after his first gallop he was shocked to find that his “legs were noodles. I could barely stand up”

Ballet Natalie Portman for Black Swan (2010) It was less the twinkling of the toes than the jutting of the collar-bones that impressed in Portman’s portrayal of a New York ballet girl, for which she trained for five hours a day, seven days a week — and lost around 20lb. She also gained a partner: she met her future husband, dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, on set.

Motor racing Daniel Brühl for Rush (2013) To get into the role of Formula One ace Niki Lauda, Brühl not only did a Formula Three course but also some unintentional method acting when a wheel of his fake Ferrari came off. “I thought, did they do it on purpose, so I could get better into the Niki part?”

Now a small boy painted by one of Scotland’s most acclaimed artists has been revealed for the first time on the back of a canvas.

The painting of the Glasgow youngster was almost completed by the artist Joan Eardley in the 1950s before she gave up on it, flipped the canvas over and painted his tenement block instead.

The oil painting Glasgow Tenements, Blue Sky, 1954 hung privately in the home of Eardley’s sister until her death a few years ago. It is only after coming up for sale at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh that it has been publicly revealed to harbour a secret artwork.

Eardley, one of Britain’s greatest postwar artists, is renowned for her portraiture of street children and landscapes of the village of Catterline on the northeast coast of Scotland.

The gallery believes that the boy in the hidden portrait is Andrew Samson, aged 12, part of a large family who lived near Eardley’s studio in the poverty-stricken area of Townhead.

“She has got the head nice but has obviously given up from the knees down, “says Christina Jansen, managing director of the gallery on Dundas Street. “It has been a family picture so they have been aware of his existence on the back.

“Occasionally other pictures have been found behind a canvas. When she [Eardley] was in Catterline she used some of her pictures as insulation in the roof of her cottage, so when she sold that house people found the paintings.”

The Scottish Gallery is exhibiting 23 works by Eardley throughout February. The exhibition, which complements the retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland, has some paintings which have never been seen in public before.

Many have been in the Eardley family since her death in 1963, and include rare paintings from her travels in Italy in the late 1940s.

The double-sided tenement painting has already sold for £115,000.