- 5 months ago
Old World Charm preserves the traditional craft of hand-painted signs amidst the modern world of printing. The founder, Charmaine Chen, shares how she finds beauty in the imperfections of hand-painted signs — and in the stories they preserve over time.
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LearningTranscript
00:00I kind of just wanted to keep painting and learning and painting and learning.
00:04And I've never felt that way about something before, as cheesy as it sounds.
00:08It was like a click in my brain.
00:10And then I realised that, okay, I think if this is something that I can sustain myself with,
00:17then this is what I should go and seek out.
00:19People like to ask you questions when you're on a ladder.
00:23And I'll get questions like, you know, huh?
00:26You can make money from this?
00:28How much, like, what are you doing?
00:30Why would you do this?
00:32Why didn't you just print it?
00:39I'm Charmaine.
00:40I'm a sign painter.
00:42And I practice both traditional sign painting and gold leaf gilding.
00:47I go by the name of Old World Charm.
00:49And I've been painting for 11 years now.
00:52It was only in 2023, though, that I went full-time with my sign painting.
00:58A lot of the work I've been doing right now is on-site.
01:03Starting off in the studio, getting all my materials ready, getting all my patterns ready,
01:08getting all my paint ready, my tools, getting that set up and then heading down to my client's
01:14work site.
01:14I like painting on walls and I like the sun.
01:18And I think when you're outdoors as well, people get to see what you're doing and it
01:21helps them understand.
01:23I paint on glass, wood and concrete.
01:26So I guess in one month I could be doing all three things.
01:29I would clean the glass at least twice, back and front.
01:32But if your glass is not perfectly clean, there's going to be impurities in the glass, in your
01:38window cleaner, in the water that they sprayed on the glass, and that's going to show up
01:42in your gold.
01:43It's going to make your gold kind of murky or your paint won't stick.
01:48The most important step.
01:49So maybe I can show you that.
01:50So I'm just going to show you a random glass panel.
02:00Actually, sometimes the older the glass, the better because it's got a bit of bite in it.
02:04Like the scratches create a bit of bite and that allows the paint and the gold to stick
02:10onto the glass a bit better.
02:20I use a lot of enamel and gold leaf.
02:30With sign painting, we use different kind of brushes with kind of really long hairs so
02:34that it carries a lot of paint as you drag so that you can get a full stroke.
02:39What you need for pulling lines, letters, and that also works really nicely with enamel
02:43because enamel's got a nice opacity to it, a nice flow.
02:48A lot of the times that you paint your brush is really nice and sharp and flat so that you
02:53can get into the edges and get into the corners of your letters that you need to paint.
02:57And then you kind of pull it down.
02:59So with gold leaf, it's essentially gold that's been beaten down into really, really thin sheets.
03:04And it's quite a finicky application if you're not used to it because it's so delicate.
03:10If the wind blows and things like that, it just kind of flies away.
03:13I did this during a workshop as well.
03:18I managed to achieve quite a lot of things that I've never done before.
03:22I kind of like finger blended from the back.
03:25I'll show you what the back looks like.
03:26The back looks crazy, but I actually really like the back.
03:30So you've got like a few colors going, and when it's wet, use your finger and you blend
03:35it while you're looking at the front, which is actually a little bit challenging, and I was
03:39quite happy with the result.
03:41It's really subtle, but I've actually got like a lighter gold here, and then you've
03:47got a darker gold here.
03:48So it's kind of like a gradient blend.
03:50And that was water gilded, so you get a reflective mirror effect.
03:56Yeah, that was the first time I've ever done that.
03:58And then I put some mother of pearl in here too.
04:01Water gilding is a process of gilding where you would use a mixture of gelatin to apply
04:08sheets of gold leaf onto your glass from the back, all of which you probably can't see
04:13right now.
04:14So I've sealed it in to protect it.
04:16That's the black that goes on.
04:18And then whereas this is oil gilding, which produces a matte effect.
04:24So two completely different techniques going on here.
04:29It could be the same kind of gold, but you can tell that it's a completely different result.
04:33For gilding, especially gold leaf gilding, for me personally, I could not have learned
04:38it from a book.
04:39I think that's something that you kind of need a mentor with you to troubleshoot it
04:43with you to show you how the process goes.
04:46And no, I don't think they teach that anymore.
04:48Not commonly, at least.
04:49You have to kind of go and especially seek it out and look for these people and want to
04:52learn.
04:53The first time I learned to gild, it was after I saw a gold sign in a cafe in a suburb called
05:01New Town.
05:02And I just kept staring at it because it's gold on glass, reflective.
05:07Super shiny, but I couldn't figure out how do you mirror a glass with gold.
05:17And then I hunted down who the person was who painted it.
05:21And it turns out that all his work was all over my suburb as well in Surrey Hills.
05:28So things started to connect for me.
05:31And then I found out whether he's giving any lessons.
05:34He wasn't.
05:35But I learned from some other guy and eventually got connected with everybody else.
05:41So I was doing my full-time job and then I would be painting until like 5am sometimes.
05:46But also never feeling like, oh my gosh, I hate this.
05:51I can't wait to be done.
05:52Like, when can I go home?
05:56When I was painting then, it's more like, why is time passing so quickly?
06:00I've got so much to do.
06:01I kind of just wanted to keep painting and learning and painting and learning.
06:05And I've never felt that way about something before, as cheesy as it sounds.
06:09So it's like a click in my brain.
06:11And then I realised that, okay, I think if this is something that I can sustain myself with,
06:18then this is what I should go and seek out.
06:21I think when you find something like that, then you should probably keep going at it.
06:25My motto kind of thing is that old is gold.
06:29Most of the time that I was in Sydney, I was living in the eastern suburbs.
06:32I guess they were kind of like hipster suburbs at the time.
06:34What I noticed are the old signs that would be retained in the neighbourhood.
06:38The sign is bubbling, it's peeling, it's hanging on.
06:43It's got like, you can see the layers behind it, you can see the layers in front of it.
06:47But it's not painted over because it's part of the building's heritage.
06:53If they ever do paint it, they give it like a relift to like retain that signage.
06:59They don't scrape it out and do like something new, you know.
07:02So yeah, I think it was that texture, the human element, the ageing, the layering,
07:09the patina that I was drawn to.
07:12It's quite difficult to replicate age, I suppose, naturally.
07:15I think the age kind of tells a story and kind of shows what came before.
07:22Yeah, I just, I'm not really into shiny new things.
07:26I like the feeling of not knowing how to get there.
07:31I like the challenge of not knowing how to recreate something.
07:34So I'll study it really, really close and use whatever I have to try and replicate it.
07:40And then coupled with the fact that when you really do learn the craft, there's...
07:45quite a lot of areas that you can get really obsessed about.
07:49And that also really spoke to me.
07:53If you go through like my camera roll and my phone,
07:56you're going to see a lot of like random things that I take photos of,
08:00like a pipe dripping or some broken thing in the middle of nowhere
08:06with like moss coming out of it because I want to recreate that look.
08:14I think when I started out, I was really like quite crazy about making everything look like it was printed.
08:21I think I just wanted like it to be perfect.
08:23But now, as I've painted for a longer time, I really like seeing the human era, I suppose,
08:29so that people know it's painted by hand because that's what got my attention to begin with, right?
08:36So I think that's kind of something that I'm looking to harness in my work right now.
08:42The sign behind you actually is one of the first few signs I painted.
08:46I cringed looking at it because I did it so badly.
08:49But it's kind of cute now, you know?
08:52Yeah, like that I thought I was doing it right back then.
08:57But so you just keep getting better.
09:00Just a couple of days ago, painting a phrase,
09:03and I was squatting down and looking at the wall.
09:06The wall is like, the painting is about 30cm off the wall.
09:09And I was squatting down and like making sure everything was perfect.
09:14And then after a while, I just like stood back and,
09:17which is what you would do on a bigger piece.
09:19And I'm like, nobody's going to squat here and look at my one hair of a millimetre
09:25that wasn't as perfect as the next one.
09:27And so it has taught me to kind of step away and like,
09:32okay, look at the bigger picture, relax.
09:35You're just being really intense.
09:38It's okay. It's a painting, right?
09:41It's not supposed to be perfect.
09:44So yeah, I think working on bigger stuff has taught me to loosen up a bit.
09:52Sign painting is a trait.
09:53It's no different from like, say, anybody who uses their hands really.
09:57I think it used to be a trait, a fading trait right now.
10:01But I like people to know that the amount of craftsmanship involved in it
10:05and the amount of training it takes, the amount of failure involved.
10:10They teach a mantra that you can never be too good.
10:14So there's no like ceiling to your growth, to your learning,
10:19to how far you can push it.
10:21It's not just about like the fine, pretty work that you can produce, right?
10:25But I think when you have a sign painted, there's an element of it being actually really, really sustainable.
10:30If I print a sign right now, right, and we leave it out in the sun in Singapore's climate for one, two years,
10:38it's eventually going to fade.
10:40It's going to peel, especially with vinyl.
10:43So it's just not going to stand the test of time.
10:46You kind of have to remove the whole thing and replace the whole thing.
10:50But if I'm going to paint something for you and say someone bashes into part of it,
10:55I could just come in and retouch that very specific part.
11:01And assign ages with your business, you know?
11:05There are times when I meet clients who say,
11:07I don't really know how long my business is going to be here,
11:10so I'm not too sure if I want to invest in a sign.
11:14But I think that when you get a sign painted also,
11:18it shows that you have confidence that your business is going to be there.
11:22There's this phrase that says,
11:24a business with no sign is a sign of no business.
11:27I think that's quite meaningful.
11:28I see myself as a tradesperson, as a craftsperson
11:34who is just going to keep trying to make good, honest work.
11:39Take our time to make stuff.
11:41I think we need to make stuff that's like here to stay.
11:45With every sign I paint,
11:46I hope that it's going to stay there for like 100 years.
11:50So I take all those processes right to the way that I seal it and I protect it,
11:56hoping that it's going to be there for a long time.
12:00I think people are kind of understanding that in this day and age,
12:05everything going so quickly,
12:06if you can stop and take your time to make something,
12:11then I think people are understanding that there's actual meaning behind that.
12:17I think it's important and sometimes doesn't really exist so much in Singapore
12:21is sharing like nobody's going to break your rice bowl.
12:26by sharing.
12:27You're probably all collectively going to get better
12:29if you kind of get together and exchange like secrets and skills.
12:35In order for me to have learned this,
12:37I would have relied on people to share that craft with me too.
12:41I'm hoping that the signs I paint are still going to be around.
12:44Because my signs are kind of emulating a time that has passed,
12:48when people look at my work in the future is going to remind them of this time
12:54when there was a revival of the past.
12:56So it's kind of like,
12:58I think that could be quite interesting.
13:00you
13:16Oh,
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