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Do you buy paint from a shop like this? If not, why not?
That's a pretty deep question, actually, challenging the structure of industrial society in general and the building industry in particular.
The shop's proprietor is Fa. W. Verbeek Jr., Verf en Glashandel. There's a photo of him in the centre of the picture. The shop is in the lovely old town of Delft, Holland, in a lovely square called Beestenmarkt, which I guess is Dutch for cattlemarket though it now full of lovely old plane trees and cafe tables. Its a lovely old shop where real paint is made from real pigments and oils and there's not a drop of alkyd resin to be found. Lovely.
Contact the shop at:
Beestenmarkt 9
2611 GA Delft
Tel (015) 212 57 05 Fax (015) 212 17 34
e-mail fa.w-verbeek-jr@planet.nl
If you really do want to paint your exterior oak joinery, please use linseed oil paint. Most paint used in the last fifty years for exterior joinery has been known as 'oil paint' but should perhaps be called alkyd paints. They are very waterproof, keeping the wood nice and dry. Until they crack, that is. And sooner or later (probably sooner than you expect) cracks in the paint layer do occur and then water can get in. The paint forms an effective waterproof layer to stop the moisture getting out again so the wood can't dry out. It stays wet - nice for the moulds. After a while water trapped below the paint lifts the paint right off the wood and it flakes. Eventually and too late you get round to repainting it, or more likely, give up in despair and call in the plastic window man. Traditional linseed oil paint is breathable; it sheds the rain while allowing any moisture in the wood to evaporate out through the paint layer. The wood stays dry and doesn't rot.
In days of yore, paint was mixed on site from the raw materials by every jobbing painter and decorator, but these days we regard such mystical processes as paint manufacture as beyond our ken and entrust the process, foolishly, to the petrochemical multinationals. Alternatively we can turn to that wonderful Sweedish firm, Allbäck Linoljeprodukter who bring us their paint via Holkham Paints of Norfolk. It's simple stuff, just linseed oil binder with pigments, titanium and zinc oxides for white and a dash of earth pigments for colours. Chalk adds some body and a dash of manganese speeds up the drying. And it's the slow drying times that pushed the building trade away from linseed paints towards alkyds with their volatile solvents. You need to take your time with linseed oil paint and enjoy the warm weather while you're watching it dry because this is a summer time job.
Here are the rules for painting. Start with bare timber. Give it a coat of warm linseed oil, and don't skimp on the quality; it should be well refined to a pale golden colour. Leave to dry for 24 hours - more if the weather is not warm. Apply a very thin coat of paint and leave to dry for a couple of days. Give it a light sanding with the finest abrasive. Second coat, very thin again and leave plenty of time to dry. Another light sanding and then it's time for the third coat. And that's it. Wash your brush with soap and go away for, ooh, seven years or so. Then give it a light coating of just linseed oil and go away for another seven years. So, now, eventually, fourteen years after you painted the wood, it deserves another single coat of linseed oil paint. So we have paint that costs two or three times the price you might be used to paying but only needs repainting after fourteen years. And the wood hasn't rotted. As the saying goes, the most expensive paint is cheap paint.
Allbäck have a website well worth perusing before picking up a paintbrush.
The Real Paint and Varnish Company is a Cumbrian firm that makes what its name implies.
Uula is a paint manufacturer in Finland with a very informative website, but there are no shops in Britain that stock their paints.
The Green Shop of Bisley, Gloucestershire, stock Holkham paints.
Here's a useful article by Colin Mitchell Rose.
Natural Building Technologies have a useful guide to paints by Neil May and a further article on the Ecology of Paint.
A pigment, when illuminated by sunlight which consists of the entire spectrum from ultra-violet to infra-red absorbs some light at each wavelength and reflects some light at each wavelength. A red pigment will absorb strongly at the blue end and reflect strongly at the red end. The colour we perceive will be our brain’s summation of the total light reflected by the pigment. For example, a typical sample of the common earth pigment, red ochre, made from ground haematite and chemically a fairly, but not completely, pure ferric oxide Fe2O3, made into a 10%tint will reflect about 40% of the violet light at 400nanometres, 35%green 500nm, 55% orange 500nm and 65% red 700nm. To us it just looks red but the type of red will also depend upon the light that reaches the pigment. Sunlight and electric light will give different reds. Most of the light hitting the surface of a tiny crystal of haematite that is not reflected will be absorbed, warming it up a little, but some will pass through the crystal. This will be refracted, or bent, as it passes into the crystal, the degree of refraction depending on the wavelength. It might then be reflected back off the back surface of the crystal to re-emerge or pass through to interact with another crystal behind. A paint may have a number of different earth pigments, ground to a range of sizes and orientated at any angles within the paint. The nature of the paint binder and any fillers, their opacities and refractive indexes, will also affect the appearance of the painted surface. The result is a very complicated reaction to the ambient light. Paints from Real Paint & Varnish Co, Rose of Jericho, Holkham Paints Farrow &Ball etc are made with ground mineral pigments. Most modern paints are more reliant on synthetic organic dyes. Such dyes reflect and absorb the various wavelengths of light in a similar way but there will be none of the complexity that comes from refraction and partial transmission through the crystals of the earth pigments.
Contact: biff@biffvernon.freeserve.co.uk
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2004, 2005