Guy with a Green Bucket

Randy Schmidt has lots of memories of his restoration work at Arizona’s state Capitol building. The work involved lots of problem solving.

“They used to call me ‘the guy with the green bucket,’” he laughs. “I showed up twice each day to make rubber molds. I did that for months. I carried the tools of my trade in that green bucket.”

Before his work was complete, Schmidt had remanufactured a variety of decorative architectural elements. His last assignment was to replace the missing tiles from around the fireplace in the historic office of Arizona first governor, George W. P. Hunt.

“The fireplace was totally missing. But we knew that one had existed. We had old photographs,” he says. “We also found some of the old tiles buried behind a wall.”

Based on the photographic clues and the few original tiles, Schmidt did the work to reproduce new tiles down to the finest detail.

“The work was ceramics. It was my field. I thought, no problem, this would be a really easy thing to do. Naturally, it was a huge problem,” he laughs.

Once the new tiles were made, Schmidt employed spongeware, the same slow technique used originally for applying color. A sponge is dipped into different colors and then stippled over the surface of each tile.

The ASU artist’s biggest challenge was finding a way to concoct the same lead glaze used during the early 1900s. That work took considerable trial and error. Eventually, Schmidt was able to reproduce just the right “butterfly” texture.

“When all the work was done, I made a box and mixed the original tiles with the new ones, kind of the way you might shuffle a deck of cards,” he says. “The tile setter installed each tile. Today, I am hard pressed to identify which are the originals.”—Melody Cavanary