Gold Leaf for the Barber

A booklet of gold leaf costs more than most of the paint in Marcus Dade's studio combined. He handles it with a soft, wide brush called a gilder's tip, which he charges with static by brushing it across his forearm. Then he lifts a sheet of gold thinner than tissue and lays it on a wood panel where, a week from now, a barber in a white smock will be standing.

"You cannot touch it with your fingers," he says. "It will stick to you and tear. It does not want to be held. It wants to be put somewhere and left alone."

Dade grew up in Compton between two trades. His uncle ran with a lowrider club, and Saturdays were spent in a garage learning how candy paint is built up coat after coat until the color looks wet. After high school he painted signs for shops on Long Beach Boulevard, and for three years he apprenticed with a frame restorer in Gardena, who taught him water gilding.

"Sign painting taught me to make something readable from across the street," he says. "Gilding taught me patience. Lowriders taught me that people will spend everything they have on beauty if it is theirs."

The paintings look like icons from an old church: flat figures, frontal, still, set against a field of gold with a hammered disc behind the head. The people in them are from his blocks. A young man leaning on his uncle's 1964. A mother holding her baby in front of a swap-meet stall of sneakers and chains. A barber.

"In those old paintings the gold told you who was holy," he says. "It was the most expensive material in the room and they spent it on the saints. I am spending it on the people who raised me. That is the economics. That is the whole show."

He leaves the seams between the leaf squares visible. "I want you to see it was laid by hand. Somebody did that, square by square."

“In the old paintings the gold told you who was holy. I am spending it on the people who raised me.”

The painting he is proudest of is not for sale. Saint of the Second Chair is a portrait of the barber who cut his hair from age four to eighteen. Dade gave it to him. The barber lent it back for the show, on the condition that he gets to talk at the opening.

Halo Economics is his first solo show, at Second Sunday Gallery on Market Street in Inglewood, October 17 to November 28. The opening conversation with the barber is at 6, and two cars from his uncle's club will be parked out front.

Also in the room: Swap Meet Madonna and Hydraulics (Three-Wheel), a lowrider mid-hop against a gold sky. And if you are in Leimert Park, his wall Soul Sounds is on Degnan, on the side of a record shop. It is the only thing he has ever painted without gold.

A note on this story: Marcus Dade is a demo persona created for the Knect preview, and the artwork shown was generated with Higgsfield AI. The neighbourhoods are real.