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.

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.