This was suppose to be a simple rewire for this customer. They had 2 plaster bowels that had come out of a movie theater built sometime in the 1930s and they had picked them up at an auction and kept them for a number of years and in their new house they were finally going to put them up. There are 4 lights in each bowel and all that we had to do is just rewire them. I had finished this bowel and was carrying it to the hanging area and…..well I tripped and dropped it on the floor. Words were said. Lots of words. So I picked up the pieces and placed them back on my work table and had to figure out what to do.
Putting it back together was the only option but some pieces were totally destroyed and missing forever. Only about 80% of it survived in some form or another. The first thing to do was just to get the bowel back together the best that I could with the parts that are left so in the second pic that that what I did.
Picking up the pieces
Just getting the plaster bowel back together. As you can see, large chunks were totally missing. Now I had to learn how to rebuild the missing areas with new plaster and get them all to match back up and not look just cobbled together but look as it was.
Close up of some of the damage. Lots of the edge molding and Greek keys were broken or just gone.
Re carving the missing sections. Now I had to learn how to carve plaster. This was hard for me to do because I have never been a sculptor ever.This was a new process for me but it did require a trip to the hardware and art supply store to get the tools needed to carve plaster and any excuse to buy tools is a good day in my opinion.
Back together and painting to match the other one. It took me about 3 weeks in total to get this accident back together. Here in this pic I am starting to repaint the piece to match the other one. Another part of the process that I did but didn’t show was to take cotton gauze like you would use for making a cast on a broken arm of leg with plaster and reline the inside of the bowel to give it more strength and make it a unified whole instead of pieces just reassembled. All in all it actually too good of a job because anyone who looked at both of them always picked the original one that wasn’t broken as the rebuilt one. I could have just called the customer and said, oops sorry I dropped it and there is nothing that we can do, but to me I had to make it right and rebuild it because there was no replacing it with another one. The customer was happy and I learned some things along the way.