Color Patinas For bronze

The intense colors of spring have inspired a new range of hot patinas that can be custom ordered for select insects pulls.

Dragonfly

The blue dasher is part the dragonfly family which is one of the largest insect groups in the world. Dragonflies are part of the skimmer family a name that aptly describes how they hover over water when mating and laying their eggs.

The red veined darter inspired our first dragonfly cabinet pull and the original carving and first castings were made in 1995. The first pieces in the cabinet pull collection were designed for our Ascot and Aspen limited edition furniture designs.

Common Blue Butterfly

Is a small butterfly most seen in the U.K and Ireland where it favors cool grassy meadows and woodlands.

Green long winged butterfly

The striking green- black markings of this long-winged butterfly were the basis for a new custom hot patina shown here. Butterflies and moths often display a distinctive array of colored patterns, and their geometry and repetition inspired our first butterfly pull which we used as cabinet door pulls on our Seicho style buffet.

Yellow Black bumble bee

Sadly, this bee, like many other insects is in decline through loss of habitat, pesticides, and inbreeding.

Hot patinas reason for minimum order

Creating a hot patina requires dexterity, a blow torch and keen concentration. The surface of the bronze needs to be finely sand blasted so that the surface has a slightly pitted texture. The pitted texture prevents the patina from sloughing off which is what would happen on a highly polished surface. Once sand blasted, the piece is firmly held with pliers and heated with a blow torch. Once hot the colored dye oxide is applied with a fine brush. During this process the piece must be repeatedly torched to maintain the temperature. The heat acts to open the surface pores of the metal thereby allowing the oxide to penetrate. The temperature is critical as too much heat will cause the oxide to crystallize and burn. The preparation of the piece and of the work area and tools are all time consuming and for this reason we require a minimum of 3 pieces for each order.

Beetles in the fictional world of Martin Pierce

A lesser-known area of Martin Pierce’s work is the fictional world occupied by insect and humanoid bronze creatures. To better show these sculptures we are adding new pages to our site and will be creating a new collection page and eventually a payment portal.

Since childhood Martin has been  fascinated by  insects and birds and not just by their obvious beauty but by their ingenuity and dexterity. Wasps, butterflies, moths, and swallows are represented in our company’s door hardware and cabinet hardware collections. However, the scale of  door hardware as well as the functional limitations relegate these forms to incidental turn pieces, thumb latches or cabinet pieces. 

As Martin’s art work is not subject to the same restraints he is using this new freedom to re-imagine both the scale of humans to insects as well as their functional and social relationships.

In December 2021 Martin sourced a deceased aqua blue horned rhinoceros dung beetle from a New Mexico  entomologist. Known affectionately to friends  as Phanaeus Pilatei this particular insect is beautifully colored and powerfully built. The powerful front plate and horn is used as a soil digger that is as proportionately powerful as a bob-cat shovel or bulldozer blade.  Alas, the beauty and mechanical dexterity of Phanaeus is rarely appreciated due to his diminutive size. In Martin’s sculptures and paintings he hopes to shine a light on these undervalued scarabs by portraying then as larger than life and by developing a story that he hopes will be captivating.

True size of Dung beetle 3/4”L x 1/2”H New Model for Dung Sculpture 10”L x 6”H Other Beetle Sculptures

A touch of color in time for Easter

As Easter approaches we wish you all a merry time and if you are lucky enough to live in Los Angeles then we hope you too will enjoy the wonderful warm days that are upon us.

The arrival of Spring has seen the arrival of colorful orders at Martin Pierce Hardware, and we wanted to share these lovely pieces with you.

The order shown here is an interesting collection of branch and flying insects all finished with an amber hot patina, applied by hand and at a safe arm’s length from the blow torch used to heat the bronze.

If you look closely you will see that the small butterflies also have dot eye markings on their wings a characteristic of many butterflies possibly used to attract a mate or deter a predator.

We have recently updated our website to show our unusual cabinet pulls form different perspectives and in 2 different finishes. The hot amber patina is available as a special-order patina.

All these pieces can be seen in our revised cabinet pull web pages and in our new digital catalogue.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

In these dark times we do see some light at the end of the Covid tunnel and used our hopefulness and playfulness to create an imaginary tunnel with our real butterfly cabinet pulls.

May 2021 be a HAPPY YEAR for EVERYONE.

The small butterfly used here is one from our collection of flying creatures a rather whimsical and artistic collection of animal cabinet pulls. The patina used was a hot amber patina with black spots decorating the wings.