Standing tall on Third Street is one of La Crosse's most lauded landmarks. We're not talking about the World's Largest Six Pack this time, but rather the King Gambrinus statue, which many consider to be just as big.
Back in the 13th Century, King Gambrinus became an honorary member of the Brussels Brewers Guild, thus solidifying his place in history as the unofficial patron saint of beer. Fitting, then, that our own Gambrinus is perched spiritedly in front of the City Brewery, raising his chalice in celebration, as if to say,"Welcome! Be merry!" Perhaps equally as fitting, our beloved king just got a long-overdue, and much-needed, makeover.
This past June, the owner of City Brewery, George Parke III, contacted local artist and co-founder of the Green Bay Street Studio, Matt Duckett, to see if he would be interested in restoring a faded and worn out King Gambrinus, which came to La Crosse 60 years ago from a brewery that closed.
"When I was first asked to do it," Duckett thinks back, "it was put to me that, '[The statue] probably needs a little bit of prep, and a little bit of landscaping.'" Duckett explains that when he took a first look at the statue, he saw that a lot of the paint had blistered and worn out, but he didn't realize the job would turn out to be so extensive.
"Originally I figured it would just be a matter of sanding [the old paint] down, keeping what we could of the original historic paint job, and then adding to it," he explains, "but very, very little would have been salvageable." For instance, the enamel on the king's cape was too badly weathered and worn through, and on the cape alone were five different shades of red.
Duckett enlisted the help of fellow artist Erich Boldt and began scraping off the old paint. But the job proved to be even more difficult, as they realized the statue was comprised of a multitude of materials, including aluminum, tin, copper, fiberglass, wood, caulk and various car body fillers, to name a few. Since all the repairs made to the statue in the past had been done solely by employees of the brewery, they had always just used whatever they had on hand. Stripping the paint revealed that most of the fiberglass was shattered, there were various holes punched throughout some of the filler, and the king's hand would have to be completely rebuilt due to a past incident involving the theft of the sword he holds.
"So now we can't just strip it down, pull out the original paint colors, patch the colors, and then paint it," Duckett recalls. "We had to do a lot of fiberglass and Bondo (plastic body filler) work, but I was lucky enough to know how to do it. If I wouldn't have, I would've just been lost as far as how to do these repairs."
Duckett did, however, have to learn a lot about painting the different kinds of metals, mainly copper. As with the past repairs, the statue had been repainted with whatever the brewery had on hand: enamel, latex, even basic spray paint. But it had always been repainted based on colors that had faded. So the once vibrant, deep purple on the king's tunic had faded to a light blue and had been continuously recolored as such. The sword, originally depicted as brown in its scabbard, had been repainted silver when it was reattached after its ransacking.
Duckett wanted to make sure that his new paint job was consistent with the original colors of the statue. One of the guides he used was a picture from the beer tent at the Fest grounds that shows a lot of the original colors, but he also used something a bit more precise than an old photograph: the Pantone Matching System, a standardized color reproduction system.
"Pretty much the entire printing world calibrates according to these Pantone colors to make sure that the printers are printing the exact colors you see on your monitor," Duckett explains. That way, not only does he know that the tunic is supposed to be purple, he knows exactly what specific shade of purple.
Now, with the holes filled, a thick coat of sealer primer and various shades of bright, oil-based paint ("the toughest paint we could find," says Duckett), King Gambrinus is back to his old self, just in time for the throngs of visitors over Oktoberfest, and Duckett is glad to have been a part of this project, setbacks aside.
"It's a lot more work than I thought it would be, but [the statue] is a landmark," he says. "People would come up while we were working and take pictures of the king. Even when it was sanded down to bare metal, they're still taking pictures.
"It's nice to be working on something that important." |
