Whitewash

I’ve been repainting a shop sign so it can be used in a gallery display.   The sign was once used above the entry door of a store front where I had some ironwork on display.  It became quite faded so it needed a new paint job.  At the time I first need the sign I din’t have time to put much thought or work into it.  I just asked the water jet shop to try and more or less reproduce the lettering used on my web site and blog.  I did the paint job myself.  I’m not much of a painter but it was good enough.  Now, I’m trying to repeat the process.

Maybe it was the painting or the fact that our landscape is completely white with snow that got me thinking about painting other things.   In childhood days, the chicken shed, the alley fence and the basement walls were painted white.  It was actually whitewash and not real paint.

Back then I had never heard the expression, ”Too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint.”  I think we were somewhere in the middle there.  In the early years, the forties, we used whitewash.  In the later years, the sixties, we used paint.

I especially remember painting the basement walls.  Unlike Tom Sawyer, I liked doing it.  It was one of those jobs where progress shows up well.  The whitewash had a bit of a disagreeable odor when fresh but that went away after drying a few days.  Cleanup was easier than with paint.

I also have a very clear recollection of the first time paint was used on the board fence along the alley.   I was probably in about the third grade and I undertook the job without authorization, wasted paint and got into really big trouble.  Maybe we were actually too poor to paint.

I need to go back to the shop this morning and put on the finishing touches so Betty can take it to the gallery when she goes to work today.

The header lettering

The sign lettering