Ndesign: Micki and Mitchell Cavanagh, Reed’s Gold Leaf

“There’s a lot to handling gold, because it will just fly away,” says Micki Cavanagh, owner of Reed’s Gold Leaf antique frame restoration and gold-leafing services. As Micki speaks, she is patting a squirrel-hair gilder’s tip — the size of a small comb — against the hair on her own head. Why? To charge the bristles with static electricity so they’ll grab the sheet of gold in her other hand, letting her lay it onto a frame currently under repair in her Madison, Tenn., workshop. 

To understand how thin the leaf is, imagine a piece of gold approximately the size of a coin, pounded out so thin it could cover a sculpture the size of a horse and rider. “Paper-thin” does not convey the atomic delicacy of the patent metal, which wiggles — somewhere between a liquid and a solid — at the tips of the squirrel hairs in Micki’s hand.

Reed’s Gold Leaf is a rare resource for sculptors, furniture-makers, framers and craftspeople who want to finish their products with metal. Micki’s mom, Lou Reed, started the business in the early 1980s, when she owned Reed’s Custom Framing and had to send gilding repair work to Atlanta. To keep gilding repairs in-house, she studied the intricate processes of water- and oil-gilding, with their Old-World ingredients and tools, including rabbit-skin glue, handmade gesso and clay bole undercoatings, squirrel-hair brushes and agate burnishers. Eventually, Lou’s son-in-law Mitchell realized that if someone else didn’t learn her trade, Reed’s Gold Leaf would disappear. “I couldn’t let that happen” says Mitch, who joined his mother-in-law in 1986, when she was working on a project at Vanderbilt University’s Kirkland Hall. “My heart was in it.” 

After 20 years in advertising, Micki finally joined the family business that she’d grown up around. After Lou died in 2004, the Cavanaghs began running Reed’s Gold Leaf in their home studio. 

Early on, Mitch and Lou gilded the frieze of Alan LeQuire’s “Athena Parthenos” sculpture inside the Parthenon. In 2002, Reed’s Gold Leaf helped train a team of a dozen novices to apply precious metal to “Athena,” and they later applied the 23.75-karat gold to the tambourine on Alan’s “Musica.”

More recently, Micki and Mitch helped Alan’s protégé Amber Lelli gild her “Celestial Falls” sculpture at the Donelson library with aluminum leaf. And Micki consulted on this summer’s installation of Alan’s Monumental Figures at the Parthenon, where a gleaming heroic-scale bust of Fannie Lou Hamer greets visitors at the entrance. 

When the Cavanaghs aren’t making monumental sculptures shine, they’re often repairing frames and mirrors, such as a 250-year-old Regency girandole with golden globes encircling a convex lens, or a Louis Philippe frame whose coves and beading shattered in a fall. Pulling tiny shards from a collection of remnants, Mitch pieced the frame back together. 

When he can’t replace original material, he casts parts with silicone molds to replace missing ornaments. Then he restores layers of gesso, red or ochre bole, and gold leaf to recreate the shine and patina of the original. This intricate repair requires painstaking labor, whose success will mean it goes unnoticed. “Doing puzzles is what we do,” Mitch says. “If you’re not detail-oriented to the nth degree, this is not the job for you.”