The series of pieces that I call Sachon Falls were done as mock-ups for a decorative art project I did many years ago. I was collaborating with Eta Sachon who was an interior designer located in York Beach, Maine. Eta is definitely one of the most creative people I had the pleasure to work with. She's daring but always calm and confident. As a result, she manages to encourage her clients to take a risk, to think outside the box and try extraordinary decorating ideas.

She had a client who owned a house there near the beach. For this customer she liked the idea of colors dripping and running down the walls. The colors were chosen based on the fabrics she and her clients planned to use for upholstery and window treatments. The three pieces were sample boards I worked up for the wall finish based on Eta's idea.  We presented them to the customers and, with Eta's advise, they selected one.

When the work got underway it was more messy than the typical decorative wall glazing process. As usual, I masked off the finished trim but I also had to provide extra protection for the floors by creating a 3 mil. plastic trough taped to the top edge of the baseboards to catch the very thin acrylic glaze as it ran off the walls. As I recall, I wore some old fashioned rubber overshoes I happened to have to protect my regular work shoes. I'm glad I was using water based materials but what a mess!

I used plastic spray bottles that are typically used in hair salons to squirt the various colors onto the walls. Once the glaze colors had merged and run down the wall a bit I spattered a few spots of acrylic solvent here and there to cause a characteristic called cissing - little spots of separation sometimes referred to in the painting trade by the descriptive term fisheyes. The same glaze colors were used on the ceiling but were brushed on and ragged off with fine cheesecloth to create a cloudy mottled effect.

This project really got me thinking about natural abstraction. The cissing technique I used here I often use to imitate the natural characteristics in stone when creating faux marble. At the time I thought of this as another wall glazing project similar to other decorative wall finishes I had done. But now that I've spent more time creating abstract fine art pieces I think of this as an abstract mural. The mock-ups or sample boards we used to create the project now stand on there own as abstract paintings.