As this is still a blog and not yet a paper, I permit myself to digress and write about the role language, colour and smells play in my life. Or put differently, I permit myself to succumb to the siren song of procrastination.
It is difficult for me to decide which is more important to me: language, smell or colour. All three have been important to me since early childhood. My earliest memories contain all three.
My mother was an artisan. Until I was ten, she worked long hours daily in my grandmother`s workshop where they produced hand-painted craft items such as wood chip boxes, drinking glasses, Christmas balls, Easter eggs and much more, for sale. They designed those together, considering what might sell well and also what would not be too labour-intensive to produce on a large scale by the handful of staff doing the painting. She liked to tell an anecdote of me which I think is true because I can remember the odours of that workshop so clearly.
So my mother used to bring me with her to the workshop, put me in a high chair at her working table, and to entertain me she would ask me to hand her the small lidded tubs of paint lined up ready for the day`s work. Those were small, round, made of white plastic, filled with paint and on the lid it had a dab of paint to indicate which colour was inside. Before that day's work, she would have refilled them as needed from the large metal tins of casein paint kept on high shelves in the storage room next to the workshop. Each of the hues had its own name: Elfenbein (ivory), Scharlachrot (scarlet red), Gmundner Grün (Gmundner green), Altrosa (antique pink), Zinnoberrot (vermillion), Weinrot (wine red), Gmundner Blau (Gmunden blue), Dottergelb (an orangey yellow), black, dark blue and Jagdgrün (hunter`s green) and so many more.
She moved the little lidded pots required that day close enough so that i could reach them, and as she painted, would tell me which colour to hand her. This was at first a passive vocabulary. Later, the colour hues were so closely wedded to those names learned in infancy that, when I first entered art school aged 14, I argued with people about the names of colours. What I did not realize at the time was that the colour names used in my grandmother`s workshop were mostly made up to match the designs. Gmundner Blau was a certain hue of light blue used in the undercoat of a particular design, in this particular case wood chip boxes were given an undercoat of Gmundner Blau and then painted with a design of flowers, based on traditional wood chip boxes painted in the early 1900s.
As I write this, I realize that another thing I picked up in the workshop was how to organize work efficiently. If the target of the morning was to have 200 small size identical wood chip boxes in blue Gmunder design, those 200 were sanded (by hand), dusted, given the undercoat, sanded again, dusted and only then the design of flowers was painted on, each colour at a time. My mother first would decorate all the bottoms of the boxes, then all the lids with in this case white flowers, then all green leaves, then add the red accents on all etc., until the 200 boxes were all complete, the individual boxes differing only in very small ways only noticeable of you look closely. After all, they were for sale and the whole sale costumers would have looked at samples in person or later a catalogue, and expect 200 identical items to be delivered.
After painting, the boxes were lacquered. This being the late 1960s, the lacquer was nitro based and had a pungent smell. Whenever I smell this type of lacquer today I fondly remember that workshop. After lacquering small, patterned, pre-cut round papers where stuck into insides of the bottoms and lids, and then all lids and bottoms reassembled. Then the completed boxes were taken to the storage room, into large cardboard boxes to be stored until an order needed to be fulfilled.
The casein paint used had a quite distinctive smell too. Especially once a tin was opened, the paint would over time develop a sharp edge to the odour.
Some designs required that the ground coat be transparent, letting the wood grain show through. This was achieved through the use of rabbit size glue, which was used as a base for the colour coat. Powdered paint pigment that came in small sachets was added to the hot liquid glue, which was kept liquid in a metal tin placed in hot water, on a hot plate which sat on a low stool in the storage room, adding to the bouquet of odours. Right next to it was the work table of a lady who only did the base coats, preparing them for my mother and the other painters. There were also painters who did their painting at home. The blank boxes and maerials were delivered to them and later the finished pieces collected form them. This was called Heimarbeit, without the flair of today`s home office. They, and later my mother too, after we moved to a neighbouring village, were paid per finished piece.
When not painting with casein paint, my mother and grandmother painted on glass: thick-bottomed whiskey glasses, decanters or other glass ware, or, for a more exclusive clientele hand blown glass eggs or Christmas balls. The paint used was enamel pigment and also real gold suspended in a liquid, which was then fired in a kiln at just below 600 Celcius.
My grandmother lived by the rhythm of that kiln. Before going to be she would carefully stack the days work into the kiln, using chamotte tubes and thick steel plates to create shelves as needed. Her bedroom was just off the workshop, and the kiln next to her bedroom door. It hummed and clicked and as the kiln heated up the smell of the hot glass and chamotte became strong. Until I was three, my parents and infant brothers lived in a room just a short hallway down from the workshop and the kiln, and I remember how cosy it felt to me: the heat given off by the kiln and the strong odour of the fumes of the oil that had been used to produce the enamel paint, the chemical smell as the suspension that the gold powder was dissolved in burned off and left behind only the thin painted gold lines.
In the morning, my grandmother`s first task was to look at the temperature gauge on the outside of the kiln, to determine when it could be opened. When the temperature was right, she opened retrieve the various glass items inside. Then she washed them, in warm water in a small green plastic basin to remove the residue of the firing. This was the moment the gold started to gleam. Helping her wash the glasses, in lukewarm water, was a special treat.
The gold paint looked deep brown before being fired. It came in small bottles, was thick and sirupey, ready to be painted onto the glass. Mostly the gold paint was used to decorate glasses at the rim. The glass was placed onto a heavy banding wheel, and the paint brush held to the glass while the other hand slowly turned the banding wheel. As we became older, the banding wheel became a coveted toy, my brother and I would place it on the floor, taking turns to stand on it and slowly spin until dizzy. Or placed objects on it and spun the wheel until they flew off.
The enamel paint pigment came in paper envelopes, and it was considered a treat to watch my grandmother open one those. To make it ready for use, it was necessary to put a small amount onto a glass plate, add oil to the pigment with a dropper and then with a spatula grind the oil and the pigment together. I loved watching this process. My mother`s deft, smooth movements, the spatula gliding, blending the oil with the pigment powder. Real turpentine was used to thin it if required -- a smell I still, decades late, instantly recognize as comforting, homey and which never fails to conjure up an image of my mother. Acetone, used to degrease the glass if needed, was also always on her work table, its sharp smell pleasantly mingling with the scent of the turpentine.
The third element of my early childhood was the realization that more than one language existed and that one could learn to understand, speak, write and read other languages. I think I was about three years old when I overheard adults speaking English and referring to the moon, which was bright in the sky that evening. One of the adults explained to me then that yes, moon was the English word for Mond, pointing through the window to the bright moon. She spelled it for me, I remember this so vividly even after all those decades: you say moon but write m - o - o -n. I have no recollection which of my aunts it was. My father had four sisters, two older than him and two younger. At that time three of them lived at home in my grandmother`s house. They all had spent long periods abroad, in the UK and in France, and had a habit of switching to English or French mid-sentence.
My grandmother`s house had a book room, called the Bibliothek, with shelves of books on three walls. There was also a sofa bed, where my grandfather slept. The majority of the books were either English or French. There was the Narnia series, among other young adult books. And shelves full of Georgette Heyer`s novels, much later, in my early thirties, i bought my own set and ever since I re-read them every two or three years, one after the other, enjoying the predictability and gentleness of her stories, the soothing comfort of the familiar.
When I was about 12 I taught myself to read English so I could read the Narnia books, but soon the fifteen or so volumes of Caxton`s New Encyclopedia became my favourites. Bound in bright red faux leather, embossed with faux gold lettering, they became my safe haven. I would open a volume and, lying on the musty-smelling sofa-bed, read them at random until someone found me and scolded why I was not playing outside.
Another favourite hiding place to read was the attic, a huge dusty cavern, constructed of high wooden beams on which the wood shingle roof rested. The smell of the wood in the sun was intense and pleasant. It was lit only by a few windows. Beneath those I sat, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of old Reader`s Digest magazines, and LIFE magazines. Back then I never gave a thought to where they cam from but now it seems odd they were kept there. Sometimes I would also take a book up with me, reading and chewing on small pieces of paper I ripped off the corner of a page.
