Orlandini Studios Ltd.

Sunday May 26, 2006

BY JEFFREY PHELPS

SNAPSHOTS BY CROCKER STEPHENSON

It’s a ghost world, Orlandini Studios, not far from the south end of the 6th St. Viaduct. Angels, cherubs and archangels. Saints, demons and the long departed. Pillars, capitals, rosettes, cornices and medallions. A patina of white dust covers everything — everything — not so much obscuring as absorbing the sharpness from the edges of things, the vividness from their color. Sunlight spills through the skylights and pools on the floor like milk. Maybe heaven looks like this: chalky, milksplashed.

Eugene Orlandini has placed a gelatin mold on a long table. His black hair, black mustache and black beard are the darkest things in the room. The mold is made from animal glue, and it is the color of sap. It contains a relief image of French actress Sarah Bernhardt, of her Art Nouveau silhouette. Eugene paints her image with a solution of aluminum sulfate to tighten the mold’s pores.

Uncle taught him trade

Eugene’s uncle, Julian Orlandini, taught Eugene to cast plaster. It’s not an art, Eugene says. It’s a trade. He considers himself a tradesman. His grandfather, Matthew Orlandini, used to say, “Plaster will always feed you.” Matthew founded the studio in the 1930s. Then came Jules, who taught Eugene. Eugene never knew his father. Jules was the closest Eugene ever had to a father.

Jules died in 2002. He and Eugene were in the studio, working on capitals for a house near Chicago. Jules told Eugene he was tired and went upstairs to take a nap. Jules lived above the studio, and he liked to take naps on the enormous couch in his living room. Jules suffered a series of strokes and died within days. It was a year before Eugene could remove his uncle’s clothes from the apartment, and he has since left it pretty much the way his uncle left it. The enormous couch is caked with dust.

Eugene paints Sarah Bernhardt’s face with grease, so the plaster won’t stick. Then he mixes the plaster. He measures the water — two coffee cans — which he pours into a plastic bucket, but he does not measure the plaster he adds to it. He puts in one handful after another until it feels right, then carries the bucket to the table and places it beside the mold. He uses his left hand to mix the water and plaster, then pours the plaster into the mold. The plaster thickens with every passing second.

Checking the temperature

He pats hemp into the plaster to give it strength, and the plaster thickens. Plaster heats as it dries. If Eugene leaves it too long, the mold will melt. If he removes it too soon, the plaster will break. He can tell by the plaster’s temperature when it is time to pull off the mold. He checks it with the back of his hand. The back of the hand, he says, tells better than the palm. Only a few minutes pass before he pulls away the mold, and there is the face of Sarah Bernhardt, who died March 26, 1923.

November, 2000

By Ann Christenson

Artist Julian Orlandini and his crew of ornamental plaster artists haunt places we can only dream about.

Julian Orlandini is still a handsome man. At 66, the local ornamental plaster artist has a full head of stark-white hair, luxuriantly thick, and bushy eyebrows as dark as the other is light. His hands glide through the air balletically, in tandem with his busy mouth.

His are hands that have spent more than three decades fashioning crown moldings, ceilings, capitals, columns, pilasters, mirror frames and a world of other creations using the techniques of his father before him. And craftsmen before him.

The proprietor of Orlandini Studios in Walker’s Point and his crew go wherever their work takes them- to St. Josaphat’s Basilica, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Pabst Theater and mansions- courtly mansions on East Side Milwaukee, in Suburban Chicago and up and down the map.

In a place like the Milwaukee Public Library, where the artists are replicating existing plasterwork, it’s not easy to trace where the original ends and the Orlandini begins. And yet there are occasions where the artist leaves a definitive mark. “Do you know which pilaster [a half-column buried in the wall] is different?” architect Del Wilson asks in the Children’s Wing. At first, I can’t answer him. The pilasters have an understated swirly elegance and all look uniformly, identically perfect. But then a small variation on one column catches my eye- a regal plaster mouse breaks the chain of conservative curls.

Orlandini is a fastidious man, and it’s that perfectionism that makes a visitor to his studio two-step out of way of the plaster master’s synching, systematic movements. He dances through his ritual cleanup in clouds of chalky dust, The room is a curious crock of plastic molds, bold architectural ornaments hung upright from ceiling on down and tools heaped in corners and hooked to the walls.  As bold as the man. “I’m honest, straight out about things,” he says. “If you start a project and shift your energies, it becomes unfocused. I tell clients, ‘No, I can’t start this project until the other is done.’”

Orlandini’s life is reflected everywhere inside his evocative studio, the loftiest room in a building he purchased and renovated back in ’64 after his dad laid the reins of the business in his lap. The digs’ front room, Orlandini’s office and sitting room, takes a visitor to an era some 50 years back. Like the studio, it has settled under years of floating, floury plaster dust. On a warm early evening, the screenless windows are open, revealing the heads of skyscrapers. There are shelves of Guatemalan-type figurines made for the Milwaukee Public Museum, faded old Persian rugs, shelves stacked to the gills with books, nautical art and a big roll-top desk screaming Ernest Hemingway.

Broken-in denim covers an edgy, business-like manner that changes to wet plaster when Orlandini’s fluffy Westie, Maggie, greets the reporter, ears at attention and tail pumping. “You girls have fun,” Orlandini laughs. And he laughs a lot, a contagious thing when you express admiration for an artistry so ingrained in his bones. “Carefully, the way porcupines make love,” he jokes teasingly of how Man Meets Plaster.  

At a time when he might consider retiring, the plaster man doesn’t have any master plans. “I’m here waiting to get going,” he says earnestly, scattering particles in the air with a wave of his wands. Orlandini has a longtime, long-distance friendship with a woman in Oregon and has spoken of leaving Milwaukee- and the business, in the hands of his three apprentices, including 30-year-old nephew Eugene Orlandini- and setting up business out West, though he’s numbered the drawbacks, including “having a knee screwed up from arthritis.”

On the flip side, he has an old plaster-hauling school bus ready any time he is to meet the open road. “[Milwaukee ]’s a place where I can have a good time, make some money, leave it for a while and come back,” he says. That would have rung true 40 years ago. A native, Orlandini spent his later childhood roving around Cudahy, drawn to hot rods and anything mechanical. He had brief stints in the Navy and in the architecture department of UWM. But “I realized I was an architect and didn’t need to go to school for that,” he says.

He was a beatnik when it was iconoclastic to spout poetry and dress like a German intellectual. “I have respect for his work ethic more than anyone in the business,” says local architect H. Russell Zimmermann, who lived in the same rooming house with Orlandini before collaborating on projects like Wells Street’s Germania Building.

Orlandini marvels at the places they touch- the fairy tale homes and ethereal buildings. “We’re the guys putting the icing on the cake… the ones at the bar listening to what the guys are saying about how much money they’re making.  We say we’re not making money, but look at what we’re doing.”

Sunday November 15, 1987

BY TIM NORRIS

Watch it, Jules! Watch it!

As Julian Orlandini walks toward a front door with 25 man-hours of decorative plaster work teetering on his shoulder, he is about to discover that plastic garbage bags strewn across a sidewalk make a terrific man-made banana peel.

An Orlandini pratfall might startle construction workers putting the last touches on a $260,000 house in Pilgrim Hollow, an upscale housing development off Pilgrim Rd. in Brookfield, but it would not surprise Orlandini, a master craftsman and designer. After all, machines have been extruding their own kinds of banana peels in front of artisans for the better part of two centuries.

For the better part of forty years, Orlandini, 53, has been dodging them. He is now the chief potentate and only full-time employee of Orlandini Studios Limited Decorative Plaster Supply Co., 633 W. Virginia St., and he works with his hands, slowly and deliberately. In the art of decorative plastering, he describes himself as “the keeper of the keys.”

Decorative plaster, Orlandini says, once supported an industry. Public buildings, offices, even middle-class houses wore, on or along their ceilings, a host of designs; dentils, which look like the white keys of a piano with every other key removed; egg-and-dart; ribbon-like banderol; and leafy anthemon, the honeysuckle ornament of ancient Egypt. Candles jutted from scrolled sconces. Chandeliers hung from richly decorated rosettes.

Then fashions swung to plainer, machine-inspired interiors, to brighter colors and flat, easy-to-clean surfaces. Decorative plaster, called gaudy or pretentious, was ripped from the walls.

In the last 15 years, with a turn to historic preservation, decorative plaster has edged back into vogue. And it’s within reach for working people, Orlandini says. A good, custom-made border can run $100 per foot or more, but Orlandini will sell a border for $10 a foot or less, and a simple precast rosette for less than $50.

Demand, though, no longer will support the robust industry his father, Mathew Orlandini, went up against when first entering an apprenticeship in 1918 and opening a shop in Milwaukee in 1936. It can hardly support a few stubborn artisans. Julian Orlandini may be the most stubborn.

The plastic garbage bags at Pilgrim hollow, he will learn, are being planted under the dirt in the front garden to stifle weeds, a discovery that won’t make him any happier. He’s been a little sensitive about covering nature with artificial surfaces since the freeway came along in 1964 and plowed under his father’s first workshop on Scott St.  Orlandini prefers natural materials, even if they encourage the occasional weed.

His profession’s ingredients, too, come from the ground. Gypsum, water, sand and a binding fiber called sisal become, in the hands of Orlandini and his apprentices, a malleable plaster that fills the hollows of rubbery molds and hardens into brilliant, blue-white shapes of pure decorative snob-appeal.

His works are on permanent display in the St. Moritz Restaurant in Lake Geneva and the Milwaukee Public Museum and Villa Terrace and in dozens of private homes. Crafting them makes him feel good. Carrying them makes him feel nervous.

He shows why on the housing site as his right foot meets the garbage bags and skids, twisting him sideways. The eyes widen under bushy brows; the beard, a little more silvery than the plaster, parts as his mouth makes a startled oval. “Woooaah!” he says and then, just as quickly, he straightens himself. The plaster teeters on his shoulder and comes level again.

He should know how to take a skid, partly because his first big project wasn’t a plaster figure; it was a drag strip in Union grove. He and two friends, Nick Lupo and chuck Plotz, working for Nick’s father, Frank, helped build it. Lupo and Orlandini were known as Nick and Julie, two of the fast guys on the south side, chasing speeds up to 150 m.p.h. That was young Orlandini’s last fling, though, with anything quick. Plaster, after all, is not meant to travel.

“I’ll agree to a time frame on a project,” he says, “but I’m usually late. Part of my shtick is that without time, there would be no wine- only grape juice.”

Yet he still has some of the youthful rebel in him. Some of Orlandini’s best expressions appear during grand and puckish statements about a culture that only 15 years ago threatened to jettison him and the whole notion of handmade decorative plaster in favor of cheaper machine-made stuff.

Orlandini was hired by builder George Schroeder to provide decorative plaster- and to enhance the selling price- because, people say, he’s the best in town.

Orlandini acknowledges this when he answers a question about whether the apprentices he’s training might one day be his competitors. “I know how to do a whole lot of things,” he says, “If you’re going to step into the field and take it all away from me because you’re better at it than I am, go ahead. I’m good. You might get some of the work, but I’m still… very… good!”

He works in dust, most days, with his unpaid helpers, Barry Bahe and Jonas Haferman, on work tables above a floor of weathered gray wood, surrounded by echoes of classical elegance, in a neighborhood pounded through by trucks and
dominated by old factories.

He has built a haven for himself, just south of the 6^th Street viaduct. Doing his own carpentry, and with the help of friends, he turned a house into his workshop and studio and, above them, living quarters, with a windowed atelier facing north toward Downtown. They are fronted by an old concrete garage and guarded on the porch out front by two white statues and his slightly off-white terrier, Duncan.

Orlandini can make all of the old designs and borders and invent new ones. He can mold faces, too; jesters and masks, classical figures, even visages of his sister and cousin and himself, peering down from his workshop walls.

The faces he makes without plaster can be just as compelling- like the ones he makes as he warns Jonas Haferman to shave excess fiber off the plaster gently instead of amputating it.

Fiercely independent as he might seem, Julian Orlandini does not really work his own way. He works his father’s way. He works, in fact, much in the way that decorative plasterers have worked since ancient Greece and Rome.

In casting the piece he has just rescued from disaster on the garbage bags, for instance, Orlandini started with a pattern- in this case, a repeating series of formalized flowers and vines called Tudor Rose, lifted from a book of 500-year-old English designs. Carving the design into a plaster model, he covered it with casein glue, which hardens into a rubbery mold carrying a reverse of the original image. He then could recast the image again and again on a length tailored to the site. After curving the top of the mold to fit the niche at Pilgrim Hollow, he poured in fresh plaster and mixed in sisal fiber. The piece hardened within a few hours. The pieces are plastered into place or wired to the structure behind them.

This, he says, is what people value the most: personal attention.

He’s a little worried about who will give that attention to the Orlandini shop when and if he finally retires. Although part of a large Italian family, he never has been married and has no children.

“My sister has three [teenage] boys who have hung around, but none has shown a real interest so far,” he says. “You never really know… We get to work in places others don’t get to see and we’re venerated as craftsmen, but what these kids are really worried about is when the Grateful Dead are coming back.”

Maybe one day, he says, they will notice that decorative plaster has come back.