In this final episode of season 1 of Paint Stories, Mark reminisces about the first year in business for Golden Artist Colors - From cutting holes in the floor to fit the mixer, to the genesis of the hand-painted swatch, to failing at retail and taking paint directly to artists.
Mark Golden: Hi everyone, and welcome to my podcast I call Paint Stories.
I’m Mark Golden, co-founder of Golden Artist colors, a company I started with my folks, Sam and Adele Golden and my wife, Barbara. To finish off my season of Paint Stories podcasts and to celebrate our 40th year in business, I thought I’d share the mic with my wife and partner for going on close to 50 years. But one thing Barb doesn’t like is anything that might require her to be front and center. So hopefully for next season, I’ll be able to convince her to share her part of the story as she has been, and remains, the unsung hero of Golden Artist Colors in so many ways, and for all of these years. While the success of Golden Artist Colors has been through the dedicated work of so many people, and the support of hundreds of friends and thousands of artists, the rock steady person keeping the wheels on for me has been Barbara.
So as we come to the end of our 40th year in business, in this extremely trying, difficult and yet very interesting time, I’ve taken this opportunity for my last Paint Story for this season to be a bit self-indulgent and to share a bit of the story of the first year when we began this journey called Golden Artist Colors.
When my Dad, Sam called me to discuss starting an artist paint company in the barn on their retirement farm, it seemed a bit farfetched. I was working with my good friend, Ed Hettig in his design business in Rochester, NY, doing paste up, typesetting, stat work, proofing; basically all support work for Ed. He was and is truly one of the most talented creative artists I have ever met. The work was incredibly interesting, working for agencies doing design work for the summer Olympics, Ski Magazine, recording artists and many local and national accounts.
But my Dad was convinced that we could make a go of it, just making acrylic paint. He believed in the future of this technology and felt knowing all he had done over the previous 40 years that he could make a truly great paint. He had contacted his good friend at the time, Robert Perlmutter at Pearl Paint, who he had known since the 1950’s when the company began to actually bring in artist colors into what was previously just a traditional house paint store on Canal Street. Robert told Dad that as soon as he could make the paint, Pearl would carry it in their nine stores at the time.
So although it was difficult to say goodbye to Ed and our home we made in Rochester, we began the plans to move down to New Belin to start the company. As a going away present, Ed designed the Golden Artist Colors Logo, which has continued to be our call sign for all these years. So while Barb was finishing up her 3rd year of teaching at Rochester City schools, that June, I came down to begin the planning with my folks.
We incorporated in June of 1980. I had to borrow my portion of the money to start from the folks. My Mom, Adele was going to run our office and Dad was going to teach me about making paint. Sam was 66 and Adele was 64 and at 26 years old they made me President of the company.
Dad and I went down to Fort Lauderdale to visit with Perlmutter again at what were his corporate offices to confirm the sizes of jars and the quantities for each of the stores. So we left feeling pretty confident that by September or October at the latest, we would have our first big order to supercharge this new company. So we ordered a used 20 horse mixer and 30 inch 3 roll mill, the acrylic, pigments, chemicals, jars and labels to get set for making the paint. We standardized Dad’s recipes and while waiting for everything to arrive, we began to fix up the lower part of the 30 by 36 foot barn. My mom kept the second floor of the barn as she had been an avid country auction collector of all things – all of which she stored in the upper section of the barn.
My Nephew Jean-Marc spent the whole summer with us as a teenager, helping us try to make the barn into somewhat of a factory. At least we painted everything a very clean white, including the enormous tree trunk that acted as a supporting beam for the entire barn. It was about 20 inches in diameter and it stood exactly at forehead height. Eventually we would paint the beam fluorescent orange, but not until we all just left feeling quite bruised. I’m sure we should have been evaluated for concussions.
The acrylic and other formulation materials including the Titanium White pigment arrived early. Sam was so anxious to get started to make paint, he grabbed from my mother’s auction collections, what I could only describe as an electric butter churn, and began to make our first gallon batch of paint. It wasn’t pretty, but it was still incredibly exciting.
We filled in with cement the troth that would have carried the manure out of the barn, just before the mixer and mill arrived. Having no heavy fork trucks or equipment to move or maneuver the mixer into the building and with the height of the barn only 7 and a half feet, they wound up having to use a maple tree down the road and using ropes and pulleys to lower the mixer onto its side before we could bring it in. Once the mixer was in place I realized how little I knew anything about paint making. While the mixer in the closed position could stand up in this crowded barn as it was only just over 7 feet in height…unfortunately, in order to raise the mixing shaft out of the mixing vessel it need to be raised over 12 feet. So immediately we had to cut a hole in the upper floor, for which we had to move my Mother’s collection and we cobbled up a shoot that the mixer motor could fit through using an old ping-pong table.
Then came the 4 ton 3 roll mill. The crew bringing it in used iron pipes, leverage and brute force to glide it into place. Eventually everything was bolted down and the electric and cooling water was connected and then the true lessons in paint making began. We mixed up our first small batch of Titanium White in the mixer, first making a dispersion with water, surfactants, defoamers, and wetting agents, and then turned on the mill. To me the mill was always a frightening machine, and my Dad would remind me that he knew the story of a young man who got his hand caught in the mill and it took off his entire arm. So obviously I was cautious. We poured the white dispersion into the rollers, and my Dad began to adjust the rollers, sharing with me each time what to look for on the rolls to know that you’re getting a good pattern. At the time, it was impossible to follow, but I listened. As he made the final adjustment of the rollers and the white began to slide off the blade of the machine, down the end plate, he took his favorite long spatula knife that he had since Bocour days and with a swift confident motion, sent the paint back into the rolls.
At that point, as Sam continued to hold his last bit of cigar in his mouth, I knew that this company was going to be a success. Dad’s eyes just lit up like I hadn’t seen in years. He was doing what he loved. It was already clear to my mother that she knew her husband needed something more than retirement to look forward to. That he had so prided himself as a paint maker with the many wonderful connections with artists. But Dad, although he was just 66 years old, he was acting like he was already giving up. It was really her energy and love for this guy that the company was brought into being, and that Sam was recharged with a vitality that had been gone for 8 years.
So as the paint continued to flow down the plate, and Sam continued to scrape with his knife any dispersion that felt a bit grainy to put back into the rolls. I remember at that point my Dad asked me to feel the paint. He said, “do you feel it?” I said, “What am I supposed to feel?”
“Can’t you feel the grain?” “I said not yet!”…….. It would take me a bit more time to truly understand all he knew and all he just understood between his fingers.
By late August, I realized that we needed additional support if we were going to be ready to supply Pearl. We were late with the labels and we had more colors to make. My brother Tom suggested we speak to our neighbor’s son across the valley as he knew he was a hard worker. I remember interviewing Chuck Kelly and wondered what he thought about joining a business in a barn and to be the first employee. I told Chuck my vision for the company and that someday there would be dozens of employees and a huge factory. I don’t know why but, thankfully, Chuck said yes. Unfortunately, Pearl cancelled the order just after Chuck started, yet for 20 years he was my critical right arm in the business; willing to do anything we needed done to keep things going. In 2000 Chuck left the company and started up his own very successful construction company.
Once the labels came in we began to get everyone involved, neighbors, relatives, anyone who might join us in getting our product made and on the shelf.
Ed again, designed our label but the concept for the label came from an advertisement I had seen years ago in the NY Times Magazine. It was a full page black and white charcoal drawing of a model’s face, mostly in outline, maybe a bit of contour. What was magical to me was the contrast of the dull charcoal drawing with her lips printed a brilliant red. Since we couldn’t afford color printing of the labels or a color chart when we started the company we decided that we would hand-paint a color swatch on each label and we created a hand-painted color chart as well. We got rubber stamps with the names of all of our colors, and the four of us went about stamping and hand-painting the labels. And every relative or friend of my folks who came to visit us at the farm was put to work stamping and painting.
I was just thinking about the simplicity of the label and the logo Ed designed, and I remembered an email I received from a customer from the UK several years ago, about the naming of Golden Artist Colors. I just found it in my saved emails.
He wrote: “Dear Golden Staff, I am writing to say that as an artist, I have never heard of such a poor choice for the name of a product that artists of all levels are going to use. Golden is a name of a product one would buy for his infant son or daughter for art projects at home. Seriously, next to the great names in artist products, why such a name that is so unflattering, simplistic and blatantly commercial. It looks like it was chosen to appeal to the person who has no imagination. The packaging follows the name. It has nothing that is arty about it. Advertising companies sometimes aim too low. This time they succeeded in offending anyone who would want to try their paints who has any inclination in the arts. Please forgive us for being frank. It too easy to criticize and I have had a career in the arts that few would be inspired from, so I don't want to sound big-headed. But come on, how could any kind of working artist be proud to have paints called Golden? It sounds so cheap and unartistic, like they were made for Sunday painters. Kind regards, David.”
When I received the note, I couldn’t help laughing out loud as in his own way, he both nailed the impulse for the design of the label, as well as missing the point of the simple design as well as Golden is our family name. It made me remember the naming of my Dad’s and my Uncle Leonard’s company, Bocour, which was not a family name at all, but an amalgam of two names, my Uncle Leonard Bogdanoff, with his first partner, Erwin Lefcourt. Eventually in the 50’s Leonard would legally change his name to Bocour as he was forever known as Mr. Bocour.
Well Golden is our family name, but in truth it wasn’t always the case. When my Grandfather Abe came over to the United States, we were told that his name was changed by the clerks responsible for receiving immigrants on Ellis Island, that they couldn’t understand the various dialects or languages of people coming from overseas. So supposedly they changed our family name from Golubovitch to Golden.
It was only later on, when speaking to the director of the Tenement Museum in Manhattan who shared with me that the officials taking down names were typically quite deliberate in getting the names correctly. When I asked my last living Aunt if this was the case, she confirmed that my Grandfather changed our name to Golden around 1907. He truly wanted to become more American.
I shared with David, how much I enjoyed his letter, but admitted that I thought it pretty fortunate that our name was changed to Golden as Golubovitch is just a mouthful to say and difficult to fit it all on a label.
I love the understated quality of the simple black and white label, the GOLDEN logo and the hand-painted swatch, which still remains as a symbol of our commitment to artists. We are tool makers and recognize that the final product doesn’t sit in our jars or tubes, but sits on the canvases of artists that have put their trust in what we do.
So when Pearl canceled our first and only order, all of us were in tears. We later understood that Perlmutter canceled because several competitors didn’t like the idea of Sam going back into business in competition. But we had so much invested in this company and with so much promise I went to visit other art stores in Manhattan to carry the paint. I remember going into Steve Steinberg’s, New York Central. I brought Steve a framed version of our first color chart.
Eventually I became great friends with Steve, but on my first visit, he didn’t give me an order, but gave me the most important advice. He shared “Mark, Sam has been out of the business for 8 years. No one is going to take on this paint. You need to create a demand.” Of course I was devastated, but it started the most important next journey for Golden Artist Colors. I decided from that trip that I would go and visit artist studios, and sell and deliver the paint directly. And through that initial devastating start, grew the most important relationships I could ever have imagined. As well as the most exciting opportunity to meet with artists that I had only heard about and just as I learned about paint making from Sam. I learned about paint from the many heroes I had a chance to visit, to listen to, to share and that has made all the difference 40 years later. This year I am now also 66 years old, the same age my Dad started this business with me. I can only think now of the courage that the folks had to start this adventure and how proud I am of them.