Word: varnish
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...brought the pushbutton age to everyday living. There are already more than 300 products available in aerosol cans, and their uses range from the routine to the recondite; they perfume rooms, freshen mattresses, renew golf balls, stiffen petticoats, bandage wounds, de-ice windshields, inflate flat tires, wax furniture, varnish oil paintings, scare off snakes and ward off pregnancies...
Novak covers his vagueness with a varnish of prophetic rhetoric in mystical language. The result is often powerful as when he talks about the civil rights movement: "Let us hope that many from among young Catholics join with their brothers, join the few, who work always and everywhere for justice." But more often his style is frustrating; it clouds his criticism and obscures his proposals...
Getty kept the painting, uncleaned, in storage for a quarter-century until a year ago, when a restorer at London's Thomas Agnew & Sons began to remove the scummy varnish. Was it Raphael's famous Madonna di Loreto of around 1510, known through more than 30 existing copies and through art-history references? X-ray and infra-red photography at London's Courtauld Institute probed its veil of oils, and now the best experts that Agnew can find say cautiously that the work seems to be an authentic Raphael. "The lightning strikes," said Getty. But, he adds...
...well as ideas Aronson turns to the past. "In a sense, I'd have been at home if I'd lived 600 years ago," he says. He is the U.S.'s foremost master of the ancient and dangerous medium of encaustic, a blend of wax, resin, varnish and oil fused together by heat. His paintings always burst into flame. Says he: "It's like working on a hot griddle, scrambling eggs." The result is a warm, waxy panel more durable and more translucent than oils...
...varnish has also grown yellow on Langaon Mitchell's dialogue, which while occasionally clever and biting, cannot quite explain away all the foolishness of the plot. Practically every line is an epigram or pun of sorts ("Our marriage was a wager," "The grace before the soup is not as good as the dinner," "marry-go-round"), and this, too, is hard to sustain for three hours...