News Article from the Peoria Journal Star.
Tiles of Tin
Local couple retrieves tin ceilings from old buildings and creates works of art for display in the home
February 15, 2004
BY PAM ADAMS
of the Journal StarA 25-year career of buying and selling antiques has boiled down to peddling tin - patchwork metal tin, for Lori Daniels and Stephen White.
It is the latest crazy thing the couple has undertaken in a life full of crazy things: salvaging tin ceilings from across the Midwest, trucking it back to their big, whimsical Victorian farmhouse in rural Peoria County, then slicing and dicing and glazing old bits of nostalgia into new decorative tin art.
"One thing flowed into another," Daniels says, trying to explain the evolution of their 2-year-old business, The American Antique Tin Emporium.
She is cooking breakfast, the kind of big country feast her partner, White, and their large family of dogs, mostly dachshunds, have come to expect from a woman who loves to feed people and dogs. "I believe I was one in another life," she declares.
Daniels is a small woman with a wide-open personality who can't stop herself from talking, helter skelter, about anything or everything, and all while she experiments with tricks for the perfect omelets or keeps an eye on homemade rolls in the oven.
The kitchen/dining/sun room, a modern addition, is like her - overflowing, almost antiqued psychedelic. Paintings here, statues there, folk art and fancy dishes, and books stacked on the dining table, a full-on eye feast of interesting pieces.
Many of the finished tin pieces are stacked against walls throughout the room. They hardly look like the embossed tin metal ceilings and wall trim they started out as, in many cases more than 100 years ago. Instead, some look like elaborately patterned copper, others like glazed ceramic tile, washed and flecked in muted, earthy colors. No two pieces look alike.
The couple's tin-art creations grew out of a confluence of coincidences.
Patterned tin metal ceilings and trim originally became popular during the Victorian era. Factory-stamped with designs echoing architectural styles popular from the 1870s to the 1930s, including Victorian and Arts & Crafts, the ceiling squares and trim looked like elaborate hand-carved plaster once they were installed and painted white. Additionally, they were inexpensive and fireproof, compared to the hand-carved plaster ceilings they resembled.
Contemporary restoration-minded homeowners, like Daniels and White, rediscovered them. About five years ago, the couple decided to add on yet another room. In keeping with the renewed popularity of tin ceilings, they bought and restored metal once used in the old Bergner's department store in Downtown Peoria.
They were also becoming more interested in "outsider art," works produced outside traditional artists' circles with non-traditional materials, generally with whatever materials the creators had on hand.
With their own ceiling complete, Daniels and White began experimenting with the leftover pieces, cutting and piecing parts into garden art, which was selling well in nurseries and garden stores. Then
Daniels, whose background is in art, began playing around with different oil paints and solvents, testing how they worked on pieces of tin stripped of years of built-up paint, varnish and often soot.
They work outside, with White handling cutting and attaching wood backings, based on Daniels' vision of mixing and matching pieces of different sizes and designs. They soon discovered two things. Daniels' glazing technique - "It's my secret recipe" - reacted differently on the tin depending on the weather. "It seems to thin out better when I apply it in hot weather," she says. They also discovered there was a market for framed, decorative tin art.
They went on the road, peddling their product like turn-of-the-century merchants, starting with contacts they'd made as antique dealers. As interest grew, naturally, they needed more tin. White became busier scouting for and often salvaging tin from old buildings himself.
Daniels says they've sold pieces to about 450 stores and homes in 10 states. (The pieces also are for sale at Junction City Art Gallery.) They've bought or salvaged tin from old buildings throughout the Midwest, where tin ceilings were most popular.
Old tin-metal ceilings, White points out, are a finite commodity. "There's only so much of it available, and a lot of it is being destroyed."
But for now, White and Daniels have found a way to keep one time period flowing into another.
