Glazes (sinking inks explained) and Mosaic Muscle Car

Speaker 0 00:00:02 News features and analysis brought to you by Diary Vital. In this episode, Joe Reminiscences about a trip to France where he took a ride in a very unusual car, but first they discussed their fascination with new glazing technology. Speaker 2 00:00:35 You seem pretty excited when I brought up the topic of unusual glazes earlier. What is it that you wanted to talk about? Speaker 3 00:00:41 Well, I am interested in glazes because essentially they are the, the fundamental thing that defines tile. And they're, they're various different strands that are out there at the moment. Reactive glazes been around for a long time. They're big at the moment. But the, the, the things that really interest me at the moment are the use of glazes with sinking inks because they allow tile designers to take whatever it may be, the grain of a piece of wood or a vein in a marble and just subtly give that a textured peel with a sinking inks. They do what they say on the tin, they sink through the glaze. So you get it as a, as a indented surface. But you can also do it with a, an applied glue and then put a powdered glass on it so it's fired and you'll get a raised relief. And this was kind of beyond the scope of the early generation of ink jets, but now they've kind of mastered it and it's either by putting more heads in the line or by putting in sequential or different lots of heads. But basically what the end result, and it's what they've been looking towards is in Boston registered designs the same kind of thing that they've been doing in the laminate industry for ages. But now they can do it in tile and it's a game changer. Speaker 2 00:01:51 So is this the same thing as, for example, a wood look tile that have a matching relief to where all the grains are? Is that what they use there or is that something different? Um, Speaker 3 00:02:02 It is largely what they're doing there, but it can be different. You can, you can impress the relief in the mold so you have that pattern already on the platinum as it comes down. And then, because the difference between inkjet and other glazing techniques, like silt screens they used to have was the silt screens could only print on something flat. If you try to put a silt screen on an bus surface, you just didn't get enough ink on the bits that were going down. And so the pattern was really good on the bits that were proud but really bad on the bits that were indented. And then the flat surface was somewhere in between and you, it didn't matter. You couldn't compensate by putting a bit more ink on the areas where you needed more. It just never looked good. Yeah. The great thing about digital inkjet is you can do two things. It can print on a 3D relief and you can print edge to edge on tiles. Because when I first arrived tiles and they were putting them through flat silt screens, they never, it never really got to the edge of the tile. Or if it did get to the edge of the tile, it was quite imprecise and it was very difficult to match the patterns up. Now you could have perfect edge to edge pattern matching and on 3D relief, you know, game changer Speaker 2 00:03:09 That little. Um, there was a, a little tile wood look tile that you brought back from a show when I was very small. I dunno if you remember what year that was, but I've always loved that tile. Yeah. Do you remember what that is? Speaker 3 00:03:23 I do remember what that is. And two things. It wasn't a tile in in the sense it was not made from, uh, clay. It was actually cement and it was, I could tell you who made it if I could remember <laugh>. Um, but it will come to my mind is there's still, there's still a route. But yes, when, when I was first handed that tile, I was amazed cuz it has really deep relief at very sharp edges, absolutely crystal. And I'd never seen anything like it, but it was actually, it was made in Eastern Europe by, uh, I can't you, I don't know if they're the manufacturer, but I can know who imported it. And they are still at the forefront of things. The, the moment they're really big into leather tiles. It was Al, Al Franti was the guy who did it, but he was working for another company at the time. Now he works on his own, but it was Steve James or somebody like that he was working for. Um, but yeah, it was Ferente who brought that sample. Yeah, Speaker 2 00:04:17 Your take on unusual glazes is a little different from what I had in my mind because I was thinking of the unusual materials in the glazes. So the metal waste that's in glazes or I think cna Kim's using urine in the glazes, which actually is quite beautiful despite sounding a little icky. But it, it looks really cool. Yeah. Speaker 3 00:04:40 But I think you'll find there's quite a long tradition of urine linked to glazes and, and actually urine generally linked to surfaces, uh, all over because obviously that's how leathers, uh, the tanning of leather is with, with urine. And some of the rku ones, I'm not saying they're urine, but it, you know, various liquids applied to hot ceramic surfaces to get particular effects or atmospheric reduction ones. Obviously in the market we're generally talking about mass produced ones. Those kind of techniques are not possible in the kilns. But if you go to like what some of the French terracotta producers, they are still using those kind of effects because they're firing over much long cycles in fixed kilns. So you get less oxygen at the edge of the kilns, more in the middle. You get different effects through that. And now that's, you see the inkjet people are spending, you know, a lot of their energy trying to replicate those very effects that you get across the face of those terracotta tiles. And they're getting very, very good at it. Now, Speaker 2 00:05:32 Do they have to be glazed or do they work just as well with a, an lazed, for example, pot. There's a company made of Australia who put in all sorts into their kiln various organic materials to create some very unique, you know, smoked metallic effect. Speaker 3 00:05:49 I actually think it's probably easy to do it when it's not glazed because you are effectively just altering the surface of the tile with the glaze cuz of the, the way that the glass flows. There are limitations, but I mean, it is not around now, but there was a period when there were, you looked at some tiles and you thought, wow, that's amazing. They were, they were so deeply glazed. You wondered how they'd achieved the effect. And it, it was wasn't rocket science. They were just putting on glaze in such thick layers and it was deliberately designed to melt and flow over the edge of the tiles as it went. And they would create this incredible effect. It looked like a kind of melting ice cream and hyper glossy that's kind of gone outta fashion. And now I think what's really clever are the, the satin ones which uh, are just, they've got a certain luster to them but they're not glossy and it allows you to see the color better. And the thing I've always thought about some of the glaze pus is actually obscure the color rather than bring it out. Which seems kind of odd because you know, you'd have thought the glass would kind of enhance it, but actually it's much easier to see the color on a matte tile in a satin tile in a lot of ways because there's Speaker 2 00:06:52 No light Speaker 3 00:06:52 Or I think it is, I think it's because the light is kept in the tile rather than reflected off it. And so you tend to see it more. But what I really, really like the ones where they put matte with satin or satin with gloss and you get the, the glaze, the different gloss finishes and the different way the light hits them. I think that works really, really well. And we don't see enough of that. But when it's done well, it's absolutely awesome. Speaker 0 00:07:19 And now Hannah has a query, Speaker 2 00:07:22 Which is mosaic muscle car. I'm not a hundred percent sure if there's a story associated with Speaker 3 00:07:27 That. Yes, there's a really good story. Um, there was a, a PR company in London called the French International Press Bureau if I remember correctly. And they just wrote to me one day and said, would I be interested in going to France to see the tile production cap? And I thought, yeah, I'd love to, in my mind thinking it was gonna be something like SAS Swallow or cast Leon. So anyway, so we flew to, flew to ne got in a bus. There were a few other journalists, but they were, cause I was, anyone who knew anything about tars, they were in architectural interior design things. So we got in a car, drove through all these forest pine forests, lovely hotel in the middle of nowhere, had this really long, typical French meal finished at just after midnight. And which point we were all the guys who owned these factories plus the people from the press company. Speaker 3 00:08:13 And then, then they said, who'd like to see the kilns fired up? All the other journalists kind of were were thinking, I really want to go to bed. And I said, yeah, I'd love to see that. And so the owner of one of the guys, I think it was Alan Var, said, okay, I'll give you a lift. And we went out, out into the car park and there was a huge V8 American muscle car entirely covered in Mosaic. And he got into this thing. So I got into the passenger seat and we went down these country lanes in France and this thing was Ra had a racing suspension. And as we were going along, he was telling me, oh yeah, we raced this around Leman last week. It's fully race tuned. Um, I had it all done with this incre, this really thin mosaic cuz I like covering things in mosaics, <laugh>. Speaker 3 00:09:02 So we bumped down this ring with this re ridiculous in this ridiculous car parked outside this factory. And I was thinking we, you know, we had to get to light the kilns. What's this all about? I was, again, imagining we were just talking about a gas fired kiln. I couldn't actually see that it was gonna be very exciting. And then they showed us, and basically they just lit this absolutely enormous bonfire simultaneously behind all of the different factories. They were all woodfired kilns. And literally within 10 minutes, the entire village disappeared in this dense cloud of wood smoke. And, and I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was like a medieval tile making. Um, there were tiles in there, there were tiles in they'd basically, they'd spent three or four days stacking the kiln, then they'd built on top of this enormous pile of pine planks. Speaker 3 00:09:51 And basically there were two, this area did two things. It made pine furniture and it made tiles and all the bits that they shaved off the outside of the wood that was gonna make the furniture, they used to fire the kilns. So they spent days stacking these things up, sealing all around them, lit the big fire underneath it, burnt for something like two days, three days. Then they had to wait a week while it cooled down so you could possibly touch these things. And then they unloaded it, sold the tiles and started again. And they were all made by hand. And I was absolutely, I was just, I was amazed by it. I was amazed it still went on. I was amazed anybody let it happen. Because if you try to do that in the uk, the health and safety executive would've shut you down in 10 minutes. Speaker 3 00:10:33 Because you just imagine now if Stoke and Trent disappeared behind it. Absolutely. I mean it wasn't just like a little bit of smoke, it was really, really, you couldn't breathe in it. You had to stand up upwind of it because otherwise you just couldn't breathe. And the whole village was just disappearing this cloud. And it was happening like every week, couple of weeks. Amazing. But the, this is still happening. Do you know, do you think? As far as I know it is. Well I've, I was in touch with all of the factories fairly recently and there were a couple of them have gone out of business since I was there and we're talking, well it was probably 15, maybe even 20 years ago I was there. But yeah, no, most of them are still there, including this guy because having, having had this amazing experience of acing the kilns far and then his car and he worked out that really, I was the only person that was actually a tall interest in the tiles. Speaker 3 00:11:18 The rest of them were just basically on a jolly to the south of France. He then said, would you like to come to my, my flat in uh, in the seaside? I went, yeah, it kind of worked out by now. This was gonna be unusual. And we went to his flat and it was just amazing. He had a mosaic covered dentist chair, a mosaic covered cement mixer. He had all basically anything you could think of and main, mainly things you couldn't think of covered in Mosaic. But he also had pat patent or just, uh, some of them were patented, some of them were single colors. And the other thing they did, which his company specialized in, was they'd had massive slabs of tufo rock, a volcanic rock, which they glazed and they glazed them with a really thick, beautiful glaze. And these things were ju they were the most beautiful ceramic objects I had ever seen. Speaker 3 00:12:05 They were absolutely gorgeous. I mean they were ferociously expensive cuz it was so hard enough to even to cut this rock, let alone to glaze it perfectly. But it was, they were just stunning. And then, and then he said, we'd like to see my showroom. And we then went, we drove and went to his showroom and that was full of even more barking things covered in mosaic. Basically everything you could think of, desks, whatever. It was amazing. His secretary wasn't covered in Mosaic because basically anything that that stopped, he covered in Mosaic and didn't just do it bad. They were beautifully done. I mean it was cuz they had to be, I imagine a race car on going around a racetrack and these things, I mean, it had raced the week before and as far as I could tell, none of the mosaics had fallen off. It was absolutely staggering. But of course the, it must have had an amazing breaks cause it must have weighed so much more than a normal racing car. But yeah, really, really interesting. One of the best, best trips I've ever been on. You Speaker 0 00:12:59 Should see if you can get a picture of what that car looks like now, Speaker 3 00:13:02 <laugh>. Yeah, I, I've, I ought to write to him and ask him if he's still got it or, but my guess is he's probably now got a helicopter covered in Mosaic or something like that. Or a a he had, uh, really, really strange things. I mean, but I thought the dentist chair was the one that really stuck in my mind. I just thought, who does? Who even thinks that's an idea <laugh>? Um, but yeah. Um, but lovely, lovely, lovely people. And I think I went round probably a dozen factories all making basically 30 by 30 old-fashioned terracotta tiles and all the trimmings that went with them. So, you know, but beautiful, lovely. And now of course, very much back in fashion. And as I say, lots of the fact the big posh factories in Sulan sort of, I, I tried to imitate this, trying to get the kind of the, uh, variation, the tonal differences that what, that you get with the reduced oxygen firing, very, very, very lovely. Speaker 3 00:13:56 But they were, they were making them out of, uh, pug clay and bashing them into molds with mallets. It looked like a, a really, really hard job because it's, it was relentless, but they were very proud of what they did. And there were people in there whose, uh, you know, five or six generations had been of tile makers who had been sitting at the same desk bashing it. And, uh, and even when I went there, there were several generations of the same family making tiles and some of these factories, and you're can, oh God, that's a, I wouldn't want know the job. But they appeared to be very happy and really proud of what they did and the tradition they were keeping. And then further down the village, there were people who were making vss and garden statutory and stuff like that. But, uh, it was largely the tiles that I went to see. So Saun uh, um, yeah, in, in the south of France. Speaker 0 00:14:43 Okay, well I think that means there's another trip to the south of France coming up. We need an update on that one. You've been listening to Tile Cast produced by Diary of a Tile Addict to ensure you don't miss any future episodes. Don't forget to follow us. You can also find show notes and receive updates on newsfeeds articles, podcasts, and videos direct to your inbox by subscribing to the diary of a tile addict.com website. 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