Garden Mirror Meditations

I've just completed the first antique garden mirror I’ve been asked to do in ages. The client, a keen gardener living in Bishopscourt, had been looking for ‘rusticated mirrors’ and was delighted to see a sample of my heavily antiqued finish, like the sample shown on the website. His idea was to set the mirror onto his boundary wall just beyond the northern edge of his veranda, in front of a curved water feature.

We agreed on the sizing of the mirror (1.3m x 1m) and decided it should be framed with a pair of climbing plants on a dark-painted trellis - perhaps variegated ivy, or something similar (these aren’t shown in the picture). While preparing the antique silvering, I ensured that the mirror was well splotched and corroded along the length of its vertical edges, so that in time, the hard edge of the reflection would naturally lose itself into the foliage that was eventually to frame it.

The result is a beautiful, undemanding mirror, a shade-filled extension of the veranda. The eye wanders deep into the darkened reflection and finds little details here and there – lamps hanging from the veranda ceiling, the architectural detail in the windows and doors. It’s a delight to stare into while sitting on the comfy chairs, sipping coffee.

I have always loved the meditative combination of heavily antiqued garden mirrors and water features. Deep, dark reflections, sunlit foliage and the quiet trickle of water just seem to belong together.

A New Antique Mirror for Cecile and Boyd's

Phew, check out the oxymoron in the title of this post...

OK, so greetings from the Cape Mirrors Studio again, where I've just completed silvering another magnificent antique mirror for Cecile and Boyd's. This was a record-breaking (for me) 2.3m x 1.1m bevelled mirror which stretched yours truly (and his equipment) to the limit. It's due to be mounted on a backing board and will head off to an exclusive apartment at the V&A Waterfront next month.

While cleaning up and polishing the front surface of any antique mirror I make, I always spend an hour or so checking every detail of my work. Yesterday, I was struck once again by the richness in the silver plate. The granular deposition of silver, interlaced with zinc creates the most wonderful sense of quiet atmosphere in the reflection. If Mark Rothko had ever painted on glass with pure silver, this meditation in texture would have been the result.

Since mirrors of this sort of size are painfully difficult to photograph, I took some detailed shots of the corners instead, where the granulation in the antique silvering is at its heaviest. They only show the first 50cm of the mirror, but they give you an idea of the texture. From thereon in, the silvering only gets smoother, quieter and more sublime. It's a joy to look at.

There are very few people in the world who actually know the secrets of making decent-looking antique mirrors. There are even fewer of us who can make antique mirrors that don't look as if they were 'antiqued'. At Cape Mirrors, we specialise in making that kind of antique mirror. Our mirrors are special. Like heirlooms, they capture the moods and feelings of another, much older time.

Antique Mirrors Online

Google has this very nice little feature that allows you to see all the news items related to a specific keyword search. So a couple of months ago, I set this up in my Google News headings, with the keywords "antique mirrors". I have been most pleasantly surprised by the results. I get new stories almost every day, demonstrating the demand for antique - or very good-looking antiqued mirrors. I wonder if they are as beautiful as the mirrors I make?

My biggest obstacle in this game is public awareness. Designers, decorators and the public at large at best have very vague notions of what distressed mirrors are, or what they can do for an interior. They go to large glass companies and are shown huge sheets of imitation antique mirror. This stuff is so horrible it makes you want to give up living. So every now and then it is heartening to see articles online on the arcane subject of antique mirror-making. They encourage people to go out, look properly and hopefully mail me for a quote. This article came by recently, from the UK - based Guardian newspaper. It contains links to other mirror-makers...check out some of those prices!

I enjoy seeing the work of other mirror-makers online. There are very few folk in the world who have this kind of knowledge. There are even fewer who can make an antiqued - or distressed mirror look 'right' while avoiding the feeling that it's just clever chemistry. In my opinion, there's a profound difference between something that looks like the splattering of paint-effect style antiquing, and the artistry that turns a silver plate into a profoundly atmospheric surface. You'll get that at Cape Mirrors, folks, and few places besides.

Putting the Pleasure Back into Mirrors

This year’s most fascinating project thus far was something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a combination of vintage, hand-lettered signage, and a whole handful of silvering recipes I’ve had on the boil for years. I called up Mandy at Glass Art to make up the vinyl template for me, and I silvered the mirror back in March this year.

Because I wanted to push the distressing way past the norm, I decided to leave certain areas of the glass unpolished before I silvered. I also decided to etch the silver plate in a rather ham-fisted, blotchy fashion. The idea was to then re-silver these areas with an extremely thin coat of silver. To complete the torment, I used a combination of two backing paint colours: a deep chocolate, which I covered over with black.

The result is one of the most beautiful mirrors I’ve ever made. The hand-drawn lettering is absolutely magnificent in itself. While I take no credit for this, I still think I managed to make it look ever better. I love the scribed effect of the lettering against the ‘bright’ parts of the mirror, where the silver plate is most intact.

However, the real pleasure lies in the way the distressing works into the lettering. In the photo, you’ll see the subtle blushes and blooms of copper typical to most of my work. Into this are numerous, scabrous ‘oil spots’, scaly areas of silvering showing where I left the glass deliberately unpolished. In the etched areas, chocolate backing paint creeps across silvering like some bloom of organic material. Whitish foxing marks, where chlorides mar the silvering, mark the advance of the etch solution.