Irishwoman takes a shine to gilding in Vermont

TradeNames:When Fiona Blunden left Kilkenny, she set up a gilding and restoration business in a quiet corner of the US, writes Rose Doyle

There's a lot that's old, tried, true and wonderful about the gilding and restoration business Fiona Blunden has set up in Vermont. Hers is a medieval craft, its basic techniques unchanged since the Middle Ages, and she's good enough at what she does to be sought-after from Vermont down to Boston.

She also brings with her, to this quietly civilised corner of the US, an impeccable, inherited, Irish art and creativity pedigree.

Sarah Purser, painter (1848-1943), the first female member of the RHA who, in the 1920s, campaigned to bring artwork by Irish artists back into the country, was her great-great-aunt. Lady Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, botanical watercolourist (1867-1967), was another relative.

Blunden was working on an old mirror when we met; mirrors are her "favourite thing" she says.

"I like old furniture; it's sad to let it disintegrate, see the work of craftspeople who carved for hours and hours to make it, just disappear. Machine-made things don't have the same magic.

"I like over-the-top stuff, like Rococo, and I love the quality of gold. I mostly do restoration of picture frames and mirrors and furniture. If I do something now it could last for 100 years."

This she loves too: the beauty and ability of an art which has survived to give back life.

Her route to Vermont was circuitous; the stops, starts and learning along the way all grist to her mill. She was born, the sixth of six girls, at home (literally) in Castle Blunden, off the Callan Road, Kilkenny.

"We were all pretty arty in the family. My father, Bill Blunden, had been in the British Navy and was a gentleman farmer," she says.

"The six of us were raised on this fabulous 350-acre farm, mixed arable and dairy." She pauses, remembering.

"My father and Basil Goulding (both of whom are deceased) started Rionore, a company making silver jewellery. It was taken over by Rudolf Heltzel and is still going."

Heltzel is these days renowned as a gold and silversmith in Kilkenny where he works and designs in platinum, silver and gold, and uses precious stones.

Thus influenced, Fiona Blunden decided, on leaving school in Dublin, to become a jeweller. She apprenticed to the Kilkenny Design Workshop on jewellery but soon "decided it wasn't for me and took myself off to Paris as an au pair where I learned French and the history of art".

Back in Dublin again her search for a metier continued with an AnCo (precursor of FÁS) course which taught her how to run a coffee shop and brought her back to Kilkenny.

"I got the franchise for the kitchen in Kilkenny Castle and ran it for three years. It was great and I met all sorts of people. But it was a huge amount of work and around the clock too," she says.

She "wore out" and then it happened.

"A friend was a gilder in Dublin, working for the National Gallery, and I just loved what she was doing."

So she trained in furniture restoration in London for three years, at the studios of Burdett Coutts, and with Christian Leder, frame-maker for West End Galleries.

"I learned the art of water gilding and various finishes and concentrated on the restoration of fine furniture and the manufacture and gilding of frames.

"And I met my husband, John McGovern. He's from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated in Chinese from Dartmouth College.

"My sister introduced us and it was love at first sight. We married in 1996 and lived in Ireland for a year, then moved to Boston in 1997."

There, in a small carriage house in Brookline, on the city's outskirts, she set about starting her own business, "mostly for private clients and mostly restoring picture and mirror frames".

She was, "kind of drawn to Vermont by friends and the creativity going on here.

"It's got a nice, gentle quality of life, not too much hustle and bustle," she explains. "And then there are all these other creative Irish people around. I went into business in 2001, when we moved here, and I have been going on my own ever since."

She specialises in the gilding and restoration of antique frames and furniture and, along with her gilding business, runs a gallery where she features local artists and craftspeople.

"If something's chipped I make a mould, make it look as if nothing happened. I've even done a minaret in Ireland," she says.

"In Donegal, a client, who'd lived in Hong Kong, came home and built a pagoda by his cottage in the 1990s, onto which he put on bells, and so on. I gilded the bells and they're perfect still."

Most of what she does is for private clients. "I don't work for museums and mostly get work by word-of-mouth in the trade, through dealers and individuals and interested designers.

"I gilded a lovely, ballerina statue for sculptor Robert White, who is a the grandson of Stanford White, one of the US's most important architects of the early 1900s. He designed of the Boston Public Library as well as several branches of the New York Public Library and Washington Square Arch."

And so, inevitably it seems, her proximity to original artwork and design has decided her on a new course. "Much as I love the old," she says, "I'm going to do something new. I'm going to design a line of mirror frames.

"They'll be of carved wood with gold and perhaps silver gilding. I want to develop something new because I've been working on the old for so long - there's a side of me that wants to do original, creative work that's modern."

She plans to start working on them in the weeks to come - but for now waxes lyrical and enthusiastic about the venerable art of gilding.

"There are two basic techniques: oil gilding and water gilding," she explains. "I rely primarily on water gilding. The surface to be gilded is usually coated with layers of gesso, a plaster-like material followed by a coloured clay mixture with watery glue. The surface needs to be rubbed smooth when dry.

"The gold leaf may then be added to the surface. Water gilding, unlike oil gilding, can be burnished, rubbing the surface with a tool, tipped with agate, that hardens the fold surface. The burnishing produces a shine and the thin gold reveals a hint of the clay underneath."

She tries to get home "at least twice a year" to be with her mother and family. But living in picturesque Windsor, Vermont, she is currently, and happily, restoring the frames of two paintings of Burma scenes by Lady Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe.

Blunden Gilding and Restoration is open in the Bridgewater Mill, Bridgewater, Vermont, daily between 10am and 5pm and by appointment at the weekends