Healing Hands
Experts in painting conservation share their expertise and knowledge at local gallery talks
by Angela Wibking
Art Immortality for the Conservationally Challenged
2 p.m. June 29, July 13 and 27
Cumberland Gallery
4107 Hillsboro Circle
For information, call 297-0296
Art may be timeless, but the physical life span of a painting isn’t. Subject to ordinary aging at best and premature death by fire or flood at worst, works on canvas benefit from proper care. “A painting is an organic, almost living creature that begins to age the minute it is created,” says Cynthia Stow, a Nashville art conservator who kicks off the Cumberland Gallery lecture series on fine art conservation this weekend.
Stow is partners with Dee Minault in Cumberland Art Conservation, a 24-year-old company that restores and preserves paintings for private and public collections throughout the Southeast. Their studio just off West End near 440 is crowded with works in various stages of restoration. On the afternoon of my visit, Minault is engaged in the resuscitation of a full-length portrait of a former president of the University of Kentucky. The painting survived a near-death experience during a fire at the university, but the water damage to it is horrific. The paint on every inch of the life-sized portrait has bubbled up from the canvas, and Minault is painstakingly flattening the bubbles with an instrument that looks—and functions—like a tiny clothes iron. The “ironing” of the painting is only one of many steps in the restoration of the work that will take Minault the rest of the summer to complete.
Meanwhile, Stow has another painting literally under the microscope. The apparatus she’s peering through is actually designed for use in eye surgery, but it works perfectly in helping Stow assess the areas of damage to a rare 1940s painting by illustrator Alexander Leydenfrost. The German American artist served as an official government illustrator documenting various World War II aircraft, and his work also appeared in popular magazines of the time. The painting, one of only 32 in existence, has also suffered water damage, though less severe than that of the University of Kentucky portrait. “A previous restorer simply over-painted the damaged areas,” Stow points out. “After cleaning it, I’ll only restore the areas of loss.” She demonstrates with a tiny brush what that means: applying perfectly matched paint to just the areas where paint is missing. “Neither of us is an artist,” Stow explains of the work that she and Minault do. “We repair or replace missing elements—and our work is limited to the exact area of loss.”
If neither Stow nor Minault is a trained artist, both have solid backgrounds in their field, each with an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in conservation. Clients include Cheekwood, the Tennessee State Museum, Brooks Museum in Memphis, Vanderbilt University and the University of Kentucky, as well as individual collectors in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee. “We work across the board on very valuable paintings, on ones of historical importance and ones with mostly sentimental value, like family portraits,” says Stow. Examples currently under restoration include a colorful seascape by obscure American artist John Whorf (1903-1959), a lovely 1930s portrait of a young woman by area artist Grace Turner and an 1885 painting of the biblical figure David playing a harp by British artist James Clark. This last work is from the collection of the Women’s Club of Nashville. “We’re in the cleaning process right now—it was absolutely amber with age, and there was no sense of the flesh tones at all,” says Stow. “Once we’re done, David’s skin should look like porcelain.”
As for do-it-yourself restoration, Stow’s advice is simple: don’t. “We see a lot of inept restorations ranging from over-painting to disguise the damage and gluing torn canvas to a wooden support, to filling in areas of flaking paint with something resembling Bondo.”
Despite her daily dealings with neglected or damaged paintings, Stow claims that works on canvas are actually a pretty hardy breed of art. “It’s not so much the environmental extremes themselves that do the damage as it is sudden fluctuations,” she says. “If a painting is allowed to acclimate itself gradually, it will usually do well. Putting a painting near an outside door where is gets sudden blasts of hot or cold air, on the other hand, will take a toll.”
But even the most devastating injuries can often be healed. “We had a client who had an oil on panel by Gilbert Stuart,” the 18th century American artist famous for his portraits of George Washington. “The owner put it in his trunk to bring it to us and then forgot about it,” Stow recalls. “Later he put a case of wine on top of it and split the painting in two. We had a local furniture maker devise a special clamp system to put it back together, and it worked beautifully.”
The Cumberland Gallery lecture series continues with Christine Young, who talks about conservation of works on paper on July 13, and William Parker, who addresses conservation framing and lighting on July 27. The lecture series is free to the public.
Comments (0)