Peggy's fireplace repainted stone texture

Here's the technique I used to renovate a terrible looking, but functional, old fireplace. First we cleaned the dirty red stone, and repainted the existing dingy old broken looking fireplace white base coat, then with a lovely brown paper bag wall color adding a second. This treatment cost less than $20 for materials. Cracks patched with fireplace stone fill. This is a very easy technique and we did it in about an hour and 1/2.

1. First thoroughly clean the stone or brick - it should have no grease, it should feel dry.
2. Then spackle and fill with heat resistant spackle. Let dry. Touch up.
3. Prime with paint. Paint the base coat a color such as the paper bag brown used here.
4. While that is still a little tacky, using an old brush, dry brush on another color of paint and work it into the high peaks of the stone or brickwork. We used a darker, red brown to achieve this effect. We also used old rags and newpapers to do the uneven blending.

The same colors were used on the walls of this room.

This is a very easy technique in two steps that completely transformed this fireplace, gives great results and is cheap cheap cheap!

Here's the rest of the room, the fireplace is out of the frame to the left before we installed the hearth slate embedded in the floor ...



View more details on this makeover here - http://www.wonderlane.com/livingroom_renovation2007.html

Skying Artwork in a National Museum, Salvador Dali

Interesting that searching I am unable to find anything on the Web about 'skying artwork'. What is "to sky artwork"? It is the practice, infringing on moral copyright, of hanging or displaying artwork in such a way that it can not be easily seen.

For example, when I was at a National Museum in Washington D.C. to attend Carter's presidential inauguration in 1976, I walked into a room, and for some reason I stayed in the room roaming around for a while - there was a large triangular shaped display counter with someone working there. Chatting up the man, I walked to the far end of the counter. Imagine my surprise when I looked up to see a huge Salvador Dali painting of Christ during the last supper with a symbolic image of God (or Christ risen) transparent above the last supper scene.The person working there explained to me that the museum's director did not like Dali, so he had skyed Dali's expensive, fabulous and famous work so that no one would see it hanging above the display counter, high on the wall, on back end of an otherwise dead end hallway.

In the United States the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 may cover some of the central issues of moral copyrights that would not justify the museum director's actions - certainly Dali did not paint this work to cleverly *not* be displayed. But in Europe there may be more broad repercussions and remedies to a public funded entity such as a museum purposely hiding artworks which the museum director only personally finds distasteful or that he or she does not enjoy.

ps If Dali did in fact paint paintings so hideous that hiding them could be considered justifable, and such was his intention, how would we ever know?.