Coming this week, another great give away

Keep coming back this week gang. On Thursday I'll be announcing another give away. This one's also a pretty big ticket item, though I won't make anybody work as hard as I did the last time. Sound like a deal?

How to clean a grout joint

I get asked how to clean white grout all the time and my answer is usually, "Don't have white grout." Seriously, short of regrouting your tile every six months, white grout joints are nearly impossible to clean and keep that way.

However last weekend, I came across this article in the St. Pete Times. It's written by Tim Carter, a general contractor and syndicated columnist. Carter runs a website called AskTheBuilder.com and it's chock full of advice and how-to videos. He tackled the problem of white grout joints in a way I'd never considered.

His method involves the so-called oxygen bleaches that seem to be all the rage. Oxygen bleaches do use oxygen to power away organic and some inorganic matter, so I suppose I shouldn't use the expression so-called. However, how they're pitched is so laden with inaccurate descriptions of how they work I feel compelled to continue to use the so-called moniker for them.

So-called oxygen bleaches are made with sodium percarbonate. When sodium percarbonate is dissolved in water It breaks down and releases elemental oxygen that then bonds to whatever it can grab. Sodium percarbonate is hardly a benign substance. If it were benign it wouldn't work. As it breaks down, it leaves behind oxygen and carbon it's made from. These elements are less harmful than the leftovers from other cleaning compounds, but still, none of this stuff is non-toxic. While it's true that you need oxygen to live, pure oxygen will kill you believe it or not.

File this under the for what it's worth column, but chlorine bleaches also use elemental oxygen to do their thing. Household bleach is a solution of sodium hypochlorite and water. Sodium hypochlorite is made from table salt. Dissolved in water, sodium hypochlorite breaks down into elemental oxygen and hydrochloric acid. The atomic oxygen is what does the bleaching, but the hydrochloric acid goes looking for carbon bonds to break. This is not always a bad thing, hydrochloric acid is also the active ingredient in your stomach acid. The hydrochloric acid left behind by chlorine bleach may help you digest your dinner, but it does the same thing to the grout joints on your floor. That's why using chlorine bleach on masonry, concrete or grout is a bad idea.

Anyhow, here's what Tim Carter recommends to clean grout joints.

To clean floor tiles, all you need to do is mix any high-quality oxygen bleach with warm water and stir it until it dissolves. The next step is to pour the solution onto the floor tile so the grout lines are flooded, as if you had spilled a glass of water. It's best to apply the oxygen-bleach solution to dry grout so the solution soaks deeply. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes to allow the oxygen bleach to work. If it completely soaks in, add more solution, making sure there is always plenty on the grout.

The longer you let the solution sit, the less work you have to do. The oxygen ions work for up to six hours. To get maximum cleaning results, scrub the grout lightly after 30 minutes. Always pour new solution onto the grout as you scrub. You have to always scrub a little, but that's how anything gets clean.

Once you have clean floor tiles, keep the grout looking good by adding oxygen bleach powder to your mop water. Apply a liberal amount of mop water to the floor, scrubbing the tile surface with the mop. Leave the mop water in the grout joints without rinsing the floor; the oxygen ions will clean the light dirt in the grout without scrubbing. Come back 30 minutes later and rinse the floor with clean water. Do this each time, and you can avoid scrubbing the floor altogether.

Don't worry if your tile floor is installed next to carpeting. The oxygen-bleach solution will not hurt the carpet and can clean it. In fact, to clean carpeting with oxygen bleach, simply mix up the solution and use a sprayer to saturate the carpet fibers. Let the solution soak for 30 minutes, and then use a regular carpet shampoo machine to finish the job.

You also can mix up small amounts of the solution to handle small spills, such as wine or cranberry juice. It's always best to work on stains while they're fresh, but tile floors that have been dirty for years will come clean in no time with oxygen bleach.

I was over at a previous client's yesterday and he'd read the same article. In a miracle of timing, he was in the middle of cleaning his floors with Oxy Clean so I had the chance to see this at work. And it did work. If you have a dirty grout joint problem, give this a try. Sodium percarbonate doesn't work as quickly as sodium hypochlorite, but it does work.

Unbelievable. Really.

When I was rooting around for images of Michelangelo's David earlier, I came across this.

It's a copy of the David, only it's covered up to protect the half wits who would find the original offensive. Wrapping a skirt around the David is what's offensive. Talk about an abomination. This should be against the law. If you're so whacked that you can't look at a classical nude and not be able to control your lusts, you have far deeper problems than I want to contemplate.

I did have to laugh though. Imagine what the mind who would cover up David would do to the Barberini Faun.

Or Hercules and Diomedes.

Or for that matter, this Drunken Hercules. A copy of this statue sits behind my toilet. Where else would I put it?

Speaking of the Renaissance...

It's Easter and nobody wants to read about kitchen design today. So, I'm going to take advantage in the lull and run my mouth some more about the Renaissance. Indulge me.

The piece I wrote yesterday about the colorized ancient statuary got me thinking about the Italian Renaissance in general and Michelangelo Buonarroti in particular. Michelangelo sculpted his David in what was supposed to have been a commission to outfit the the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral with a series of 12 old testament figures. The block of marble it's carved from was already on site when the guild responsible for the commission was shopping for a sculptor. Many of the greats of the time were called in to look over the marble, including Leonardo Da Vinci, but no one really wanted to work with the piece of marble in question.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was 26-years-old at the time and he convinced the guild that he deserved the commission. He got it, obviously, and spent the next two years of his life bringing his David to life.

Michelangelo worked in the Mannerist style of the High Renaissance. A key concept in Mannerism is the exaggeration of the human form to make a statement. In addition to David being rendered in a Mannerist style, he's also in a Classically Greek heroic pose. He's standing in contrapposto, his body is turned and his weight is shifted back onto his right leg. This shift back throws David's spine into an S shape and the contrapposto is why David seems to be caught in mid-movement.

Contrapposto and implying movement didn't start with Michelangelo though. Here's a Classical Greek sculpture, the Doryphoros, from 400 BC. Michelangelo and the rest of the Renaissance greats would have studied the Doryphoros and other surviving statues from antiquity. Through their studies, they could recreate and re-interpret these classical forms to make something new and fitting for their own time.

Amazing. While I was rooting around the Internet and looking for images of David, I stumbled up a website that made a point I'd never considered. The site, Michelangelo's David Correctly Oriented is the work of J. Huston McColloch, an Economics professor at the University of Ohio.

When the David was completed, its unveiling was met with a hail of popular acclaim and it never made it up onto the buttresses of the cathedral where it was intended to go. Instead, it was put on display at ground level. It remained at the entrance to Florence's Palazzo Vecchio for several hundred years.

The David is a work of unquestioned genius and it's also a pretty powerful political statement. Unlike most depictions of the story of David and Goliath,  Michelangelo's David is unique in that it shows the young man at the moment he decided to take on Goliath. David was usually shown after he'd slain the giant. So David, in contrapposto, is turning to face down his opponent. Make no mistake though, David is a political statement. Arguably, Michelangelo is using the character David to make a political point more than a religious one. David symbolizes the Florentine Republic as the Medici sought to defend themselves from the more powerful Borgias. Michelangelo's David = Cosimo Di Medici, Goliath = Caesar Borgia. Everyone who looked at this statue understood this and they also know how the biblical story turned out. No wonder it was so popular.

The David was moved into Florence's Galeria della Academia in 1873 and has been in that same position ever since. However, the view everyone sees today and the image everybody knows is actually the side view. McCulloch's site has this image of David in its proper orientation. Due to the size of the nave where the David's currently displayed, this perspective is impossible to see without the help of some digital imagery.

That certainly puts him in a whole new light. He looks menacing and poised to spring here and his movement is just not possible to see in the side view. Fascinating. David-as-Medici is easier to see from this perspective as well.

As I mentioned before, David is rendered in a Mannerist style. The Mannerists took liberties with the human form to make a point. Michelangelo made David's hands out of proportion with the rest of his body. David's hands are disproportionately large to show his intelligence and strength. Similarly, his musculature and symmetry are perfect beyond human standards. That's because David is a symbol of the best of humanity, he's not a representation of an actual person. David is an ideal. In typical Mannerist style too, his genitals are scaled down to the point where they indicate his maleness but don't distract. Mannerist, shrunken genitalia shout that this is a serious work, it's not erotica. Most amazing to me is that David's eyes are pointing in two different directions. Here's a close up of his face.

His left eye is looking into the distance, sizing up his opponent. But his right eye is looking down at the viewer. This isn't possible of course, but again it's Mannerist symbolism. David is sizing up his opponent and at the same time he's telling his audience that this is their fight too.

The David has so much going on with it that entire careers have been made out of studying it. But why is this important? Well, it's important because art doesn't happen in a vacuum. No human endeavor does. All human progress is based on the work, thoughts and ideas of the generations before. Henry Moore's work exists because Auguste Rodin's work came before. Rodin's The Thinker drew its inspiration from Michelangelo. Michelangelo carved his David because Polykleitos carved his Doryphoros. Polykleitos drew inspiration from the Egyptians and Persians. And so it goes back to the very dawn of humanity when an early Homo sapiens looked at his hand and decided to draw it on the wall of a cave.

I say this stuff important because it helps me keep my life and my ideas in perspective. The life I lead and the thoughts I have (and the life you lead and thoughts you have) are the direct result of everyone who came before me. Nothing's original. Not my life, not my thoughts, not my likes and not my dislikes. 

So to sum it all up, does this look familiar?

This is an image of Hermes Kriophoros (the ram-bearer) from 500 BC.

Now where do you think this image below might have come from?

Maybe the Renaissance missed something

I get a quarterly magazine from Sherwin-Williams called Stir. Stir is dedicated to the study of color and it's usually well worth the read when it arrives. The latest issue landed on my desk this week and on its cover was an image of a brilliantly painted statue of an ancient Greek archer. Here's the image that was on the cover.

I dove right and and I learned a thing, several things in fact. My comment yesterday about art history being your friend is true, true, true; and never more so when somebody figures something out that upsets the apple cart. That image is from a museum exhibit that's been making the rounds for the last couple of years. You can read more about it on a site called Archeology, a publication of the Archeological Institute of America.

Now, I always knew that a lot of Greek and Roman sculpture was painted. But that was always theoretical, none of the sculpture in question still had its original colors intact. The ancient Greeks and later, the Romans, made paint from finely ground pigments in an organic binder. Over the course of the last couple thousand years, those binders have broken down and the original colors have dissolved. All of that color information was lost to time. Or so I always thought.

Vinzenz Brinkmann, formerly a curator at the Glyptothek Museum in Munich, has spent the last 25 years of his life pouring over ancient statues and looking for traces of their original colors. Once he found evidence of color, he researched the pigments that would have been available at the time of the piece he was studying. He'd then recreate the piece he was studying and make it appear how it would have originally. Recreated ancient sculpture that would have looked familiar to an ancient Greek or Roman. Cool!

So take a look at the archer up there and notice the pattern of his leggings. They're kind of hard to miss now but here's a scanned image of what Brinkmann started with.

That's his thigh, and you can make out the pattern pretty well. Going from the image directly above to the fully realized, richly painted archer at the top of this post is an act of studied bravado that really thrills me. Pretty cool stuff. But wait, it gets better. Here's a colorized Greek bas relief.

And here's the scan it started with.

Here's a Greek lion that I think is really cool. I was familiar with it as a color-less stone sculpture, but to see it in authentic period colors really fires up my imagination.

Check out the detail that's carved into its face.

And finally, here's how it would have looked to someone almost 3000 years ago.

This stuff's fascinating to me. I love the opportunity to reach back through time and see the world in a way similar to how it would have appeared to ancient people. Homo sapiens hasn't really changed much since we evolved as a species and the need to decorate with color seems to be something we're hard wired to do. Western civilization stands squarely on the shoulders of these ancient people and it's a fulfilling thing to find these threads that extend back through time.

Looking at these colorized sculptures made me think of something else too. The Renaissance got a ball rolling that's still rolling. That ball is the value placed on knowledge and learning. Prior to the rebirth of making knowledge a priority, the Renaissance started out as an artistic style. The Medici of Florence wanted to reclaim the glory of Rome and they started with art and architecture. Michelangelo, DaVinci, Bernini, Raphael, Titian and all the great names from the Italian Renaissance studied the forms and styles of ancient Rome and Greece. Then they recreated it in Siena, Florence, Venice and Rome. The Renaissance was the original revival movement. Since these guys studied the ruins and remains of Greece and Rome, the sculpture they saw was white marble, sans paint. 

Here's an example that uses a bust of Caligula. The background image is what you'd expect a Roman bust to look like. The image in the foreground is what a Roman would have seen.

Michelangelo's David is in white marble because Michelangelo Buonarroti didn't know the classical Greek and Roman forms he studied were painted originally. Hmmm. Michelangelo's David is a masterpiece in every sense of the word, but imagine how different things would look today if the Renaissance masters knew about the colors the ancients used.

And had the Renaissance masters not missed the color thing, imagine how tasteful this would be with a fluorescent color scheme.