News Article from Lake Magazine.
Looking Up
Lake Magazine
Fall, 2004LORI DANIELS HAS LIVED IN A BIG COUNTRY ESTATE in Peoria ever since she ran away from her life as a corporate spouse in a gated community near Rockford, Illinois. That was 18 years ago, when she was 32 and wanted to make a career for herself in the antiques business. Later on that year, 1986, she met her partner who was an antiques dealer, and it basically worked out all right, until eBay.
Then, one day Lori was trying to put a ceiling in the parlor/living room at the big Peoria place that she had been working on forever—"It was Ralph Lauren, ox-blood red," she says—when she "started screwing around with glazes." It was a very hot day, especially in her garage, and she tipped over a jar of paint; it mixed in with some other things and became speckled. When she was done glazing the tin ceiling she was very happy with how it looked. So she glazed some more antique tin. (At the time, Lori had plenty because her specialty was garden implements.) "Pieces with winged griffins, nude women, animals, dogs," she explains.
When the tin was ready, Lori loaded it into a truck and drove towards and upwards along Lake Michigan and everywhere she stopped people bought her tin ceilings, decorative pieces and artifacts. "We had the tin from the Chicago World’s Fair with the chrysanthemums," she says. "That went like hotcakes, and it was my favorite piece to work on because there are so many cracks and crevices."
Nowadays, Lori puts up a glazed antique tin ceiling every two weeks, and she often wakes up in the middle of the night worried that she’ll actually run out of tin. (In a way it is scarce, especially with the increased demand, because it is usually found in the interiors of fancy, wealthy buildings put up between 1870 and 1900. It is unusual to find it outside big Midwestern cities or on the East Coast.). "I can’t make enough to keep up with demand, and I want the quality to be high. No different from an oil painting. Not garden art. Some people make tabletops out of it. And they all love it: the leather sofa . . . it goes with Stickley furniture and Frank Lloyd Wright—you know, the stuff that looks good and it’s impossible to sit on?"
Lori says she’s lucky to be an artist who recently had an $18,000 day. Why are her ceilings so hot? "We always have a yearning for the past, to blend the past and the present, because the present is so scary. We like embellishing something that has been around 120-130 years. They say you never really own an antique, you preserve it."
