How paint colors and materials were done from the 1950s to the ’70s: not so easy then. It got a lot better for a few decades, but now it is near impossible to do.
I am really touched by the effort to save the colors at the North Berkeley Branch Library. Maybe a short review of color history I experienced will be of interest.
Not long after I came to U.C. Berkeley in 1959, I ran out of money, paying the extreme $700 or $800 in out-of-state tuition. I returned to painting and repairing homes to pay for my education, just as I did in Michigan during my high-school years, following my return from India after my father’s early death.
I was enthralled with the “library” of wonderful homes here, particularly the Craftsman homes. I found that the local living environment—versus the one where I grew up in Denmark (my family home), India, and Michigan—had become dull, maybe because of the depression and the Bauhaus influence, along with the political collectivization fist of the 1930s that dulled out much of the free spirit of architecture. Everything was gray, pink, beige, or white. That was it. And we have forgotten that Northern California really was an early source for the spirit we are trying to restore: recycling, local elements, sense of place, sense of human hands in our environment. It is no wonder that I ended up doing colors and finishes with Alice Waters up through today. We were all looking for a grounding of spirit then. Berkeley has led the world back to its values.
Around 1960, going into the Berkeley Dutch Boy paint store, I was told by the manager, “Son, you are a painter. We sell paint, you make the colors.” Well, I had been painting in oils since I was nine, so this was not a problem. But for the rest of the painters, getting “whatevercameoutofthecan” was the best option (just like food back then).
How were colors done then? A limited number of standard colors were available. All other colors were done by “boxing,” or intermixing standard colors together from can to can. Or mixing pigments that came in lead tubes. God help you if you ran out—you could never match it. Standard colors were basically gray, pink, blue, brown, or white; maybe a yellow. That was it.
Fuller Paints, a local manufacturer, made some ready-made trim enamels in very nice colors. Better still, Martin-Senour made great paints in deep colors for New England and colonial styles. But these were a tiny part of the market. This is where I cut my “color teeth” for fancy Berkeley homes. The colonial colors had a definite mathematical relationship; it was subtle but tricky.
In the 1950s and ’60s, we had many, many local paint stores.
Going east to west:
- Fuller Paints, a local manufacturer—great paints
- Pittsburgh Paints store
- Morwear Paint, a local manufacturer
- Boysen, a local manufacturer—great colors in enamels
- Dutch Boy, a local manufacturer
- Sherwin Williams
- The Color Shop—mostly auto paints, but local
- Triangle Paints, a local manufacturer
- Davlin Paint Company, a local manufacturer
North to south:
- The Color Shop, a local manufacturer
- East Bay Paints—local
- Marks Paint—local
- L&H Paint Products—a local manufacturer
- Dunn-Edwards Paints, a local manufacturer
- Karldon—local but garbage
- Sinclair Paint Company, a local manufacturer of very high-quality paint. It was bought out and closed down.
- College Hardware
- Martin-Senour Paints, the only really deep color supply, in great variety
- Cal Ink used to be located in Berkeley on Fourth Street near Gilman. They made tints for paints and the printing industry.
Essentially, none of them remain. We still have:
- Stiles Paint Manufacturing, the last independent in the Bay Area
- Kelly-Moore Paints, who bought out some of the large independents that were left.
In days gone by, I could drive down the road and identify the paint manufacturer on the houses I passed.
Dutch Boy, now only a label in big box stores and a separate raw material manufacturer (NL Industries, as in National Lead…) used to have a plant locally. They had some good deep-color products. I would buy their errors at a dollar a gallon, and would experiment mixing them in barrels to get the colors I wanted. That is how I could afford doing colors, and my clients got them at less than half retail. Sometimes colors were mixed with pure acrylic that I got in barrels from Los Angeles, or augmented with stone powder. That is how I did the colors at Spruce and Eunice—I made the paints.
Lawrence L. Lucas cottages (1928), Spruce St. at Eunice St.
Color jobs in the late 1960s were considered subversive and undermining the social order; they were accepted when it was found that real estate was worth more when people liked where they lived. The Victorian color revival came out of this. I had to buy a few buildings to get it going. America at the time had forgotten the need to love where we live, the sense of place.
For a short decade, we had many manufacturers with tinting machines and ready-mixed, very deep colors in “mill” mixes. “Mill” mixes were finely ground into the vehicle-very true colors, and durable. Tinting machines cannot make pure colors, and they fade fast. Such efforts used expensive pigments and soon became unsupportable. Today, high-quality pigments are not available on the retail market; you have to go to specialty manufacturers for powder, or else industrial or automotive coatings. These finishes can run over $125 a gallon. Pigments like royal maroon, Chinese green, and many others are just unheard of.
Working on houses by Maybeck, who was a magician with color, or Henry Hill (little known now) who, while modern, had a grand palette, we had to resurrect colors where the pigments originally used were no longer available off the shelf. Henry Hill loved color, and the tints I needed in order to reproduce his colors cost many times the actual paint.
So for a colorist, it is hard. For metals, you can get great colors in automotive paint. The paint stores are staffed by people who don’t know the fundamentals and can’t match colors. They rely on computer matching, which does a barely adequate job. The clerks don’t get their hands wet. All the cans and the colors within are tinted and do not allow experimentation. They can’t touch the actual pigments—all are sealed. Deep pigments are expensive, or no longer mined. So, in some respects, it is harder now than when I started, because when you’re young, you can be subversive with the raw materials at hand. Today, the materials are not very available. For very special projects, it is possible, but it’s like a museum restoration effort.
After all these years, I still dream of making a paint out of lapis powder. I once saw a 500-year-old church done with lapis, it was still luminous.
KARL KARDEL
After
