five and they landed at richmond island in capel is a bit so that's quite a while ago and these will be all part of the living books and they start with sixteen o coming in one day this tall and i have a sign that said miss livvy on the desk and she said we'll leave it ok and we were very good friends for a conservatory needed rothwell so she came one day and we asked her about how we would see what was back there and every mother of this group will know what i understand what happened  that there was something really wonderful on so we made the arrangement and she came in january and we had it in the visitor center where it was warm enough it had to be a certain temperature so we could do with this that so many people here so welcome thank you sheila and it's great to be here and it is great to have so many people here usually when i give talks there's anywhere from ten to twenty people so this is a huge crowd there's a couple  seats if you guys want to when you're away and to the front row anywhere i'm not going to talk so long that you won't know so it's a little bit of a different format for me because usually when i give a talk i show a lot of pictures and i don't talk a lot a day i'm going to probably talk a lot and not show as many pictures but it's also one of the first times that i have there will objects that i worked on here for you to look at so i'm going to pass this around because part of the issue is you want to see the change the difference between before and after and while i'm talking you can take a look at these photos and if you have any questions about them let me know at the end or if you have a question in the middle i'm fine with people raising their hands and kind of  having this be more of a conversation than a lecture if you want to do that so i'm going to pass the picture around i'm also going to talk a little bit about the profession of our conservation and then i'm going to talk about what i did here and then i'll take questions so i'll start this over here i'm just going to show show you real quick what this has so this is what it looked like before and the cleaning test that i did on that first day is visible it's at about it's oval or a clock it's at about eleven thirty there's a little white dot up there and i did start with saliva start let me just so this is before after and then this is during and this is just a detail a close up of so i also want to say that it's really special working here at skyline i'm a painting conservator so what i usually do is restore easel paintings or mural so paintings of people's ancestors landscapes any kind of trip typical fine art painting and sometimes i do murals and occasionally i do painted objects like a sleigh for example but i'm also a horse person and i've been here for other exhibitions for slade a as in a lot of these people i know through my other forays into maine i used to work for a veterinarian who still and i was very well so it's it's always funny how i grew up in new york city when you don't usually make these connections where your worlds are constantly crossing each other so it's a really nice see a really nice feeling of community here that that i like and it's it's not often that all the world converge but i've got horses and art and everything acted made i don't drive i ride and i don't know that much about characters and slaves but so so as a painting conservator what your job to do as a conservator is to make things last longer and also sometimes look better so as opposed to people who are call themselves restorers who are really concerned with making a painting look brighter cleaner i'm also concerned with using chemicals that won't harm the original in any way and i'm also concerned with treating the structure and treat and and sort of treating the whole piece as important so it's it's more obvious with that with something like a vehicle where the structure is also a major part of the piece but with a painting or a wall painting you have to treat the canvas and the wall and the structure and the frame and not just the paint layers so i think very involved process so and a lot of it and also this there's a lot of training and a lot of  chemistry involved in materials science and one of the other things that's very important to me as a conservator is that if i add any material to it original work of art has to be what's called reversible which means you can take it off without harming the original so i did apply a light varnish to this painting the varnish i used you can take off with mineral spirits and it won't harm the original paint at all so that's that's another part of conservation that's very important so when i first got here the painting looked like i don't know where the where the picture at but it was really it was really looked like a brown circle and you could see th and and it was kind of enjoying that so when i first came it was think it was in like september with it it was the fall it wasn't super cold and it was out in one of the storage buildings and we sort of crawled in between other sleeze and and had a flashlight and i did that tiny test and they did start with saliva that is true of the saliva wasn't enough to to deal with this particular project i do use saliva quite often and but it really only takes off and initial grime or dirt lera won't take off of our niches you know you can't take warning shots with water so it'll take off some grime layers and the reason why saliva works is because your saliva has enzymes in it that start to was a really sort of intractable probably oil based varnish on the paint thing and so i did have to use a whole bunch of other solvents to to get it off in fact that you so much love and that halfway through the job pam had to go to the hardware store and buy me some more but so what the challenge of working on this object was that we had this one area that has a painting and then there's all the rest of the sleigh and we wanted to make sure that we could clean the painting without cleaning the whole entire slane without make it without restoring the whole entire sleigh making this play look new our object was just to brighten it up a little bit so we could see the image of the painting but not restore the sleigh so we had several discussions about whether and that's probably just from when the sleigh was was being used of slush and just water kind of kicking up on the back side there so what we decided was to take sort of and the way i like to work is always to take the most conservative sort of the smallest bite of the apple to start with that we decided that we would just clean the the image and i worked really hard when i cleaned to just really clean to the yellow strap that goes around the image and not to not to careen anything else so that the rest of the black would be out of balance it would look it would look like the rest of the sleigh and we said we would do that kind of see how it looked and everyone was really pleased with the way it looked and so that's how i proceeded so the first the first part of the cleaning was to take off the grime lair and the grime is just the dirt and because because this was laris because the same solvents that you need to take off linseed oil varnish also dissolve linseed oil paint so that's one reason why i sealed the painting with another thinner application of a synthetic resi virus that's easy to be removed and in the future if the sleigh gets dirty or dusty you can just sort of dust the dust off of the surface without getting down and actually having any sort of contact with the paint layers so that's how i worked on this i actually did this onsite it took pretty much the whole day to clean this area and that's again because you're cleaning with a cute septum because the varnish was so sort of stick and hard to dissolve that it took a while to do each area and burnished like i said and then as you can see check before and after picture so that was the process for doing this live and if anybody has any pictures i do invite you to come up and look at it up close because there are things in it that you could not see at all before that like there is the oxen pulling and there's actually a figure standing right here at the front of the sled and we think there's this area's open for debate but we think probably sort of a stream or a road that the that the sledge was on so does anybody have any questions i'd also be happy to take questions at the sleigh if you want to come up if you don't want to answer some of the group yes i didn't do anything else to the rest of the sleigh at all and to be honest the pin start restoring the pinstripe being is really hard it's it's it's like a special skill unto itself and i wouldn't i would try to find someone who did that who did that more who i believe that they barna sht the whole sleigh probably and what that and what the difference is as that they may have put more on this painting but also when you have a varnish that's very discolored over over an image as opposed to over black it shows much more obviously have you seen the pictures or have they have you gotten them yet ok so you'll see what i mean when you yeah ye yes i do and that's that's what i call in painting that's what i was so yes i do touch a painting or i think i believe there was like maybe one little dot on this one that i needed to do was the little white dot it was downed by the oxen in the figure but for my work and other paintings i do a lot of painting of the idea with it in painting as that you only touch up the areas that are missing you don't interpret you don't add anything you don't embellish you try to interpret what the best of your ability what the original artist intent was and just fill in what was no not really i mean it's it's very typical of sort of your early nineteenth century folk painting that could be really sort of it anytime  and one of the things that i'll tell you this is a case with paintings you have in home too is that a lot of when a painting is dirty it reduces the contrast between the dark from the lights of a painting and also if it has a very discolored barn ish also usually takes the palette and makes everything look warmer sort of more yellow more golden which some people like the called the golden glow but what it what that does is if you have especially with a landscape is it blurs the detail and it also takes away any sort of aerial perspective which is a technique that painters use that as things recede into the distance they get a little bit bluer and if you have a dark brown haze over the whole front of the painting you can't see and you can really great it's hard to tell but i would imagine it was it was many lairs i imagine that part of the maintenance of these vehicles back in the day was probably to you boil them or seal them seasonally or i don't know i and i imagine that there are many laris that were on there i mean it's like i said it's hard to tell but what i what i can tell you is that it was and i worked on other painted objects or other a lot of paintings in maine that get the same kind of attention where they're where instead of using an artist varnish they use a spar varnish there's a definite there's a definite difference between your more and dust real varnishes and your what we call picture varnishes in the way they age and their solubility a well is there was there was that one will spot or that i am painted and i did in paint that piece because there was a little a little flake of paint that was missing and it was showing it was the last was what the underlying layer was white and it was on a dark brown area so it was really really obvious  the paint itself there were a couple of areas of descent of my new flaking that being one of them but in general it's stable for it's age and it and its use so yeah if it had been flaking or chipping what i would do is called consolidation where you introduce in that he's of our we call it a consolidation but which just means are running your glue basically in in the new heat set and lay the paint down very gently great that's that's that's that's the hard part how do i know so there are different ways of looking at a painting that's varnished more the first things you do is you look at it under ultraviolet light which we did out in the barn so light causes because of the whales are violated as it has more energy then then regular light normal visible light which is why it gives you a sunburn but it also causes things to what they call which is why if you look at people in black light if you're wearing a white shirt looks really bright so certain varnishes have characteristic fluorescents colors so most picture varnishes which are a certain type usually a sort of a greenish fluorescent they look kind of they look sort of yellow green or milky and the ultraviolet light shellacked looks kind of orange and you're sort of your synthetic resins sometimes don't floss at all so you start by that and that'll give you a in and out alcohol so what you do is you start with your with the most mild solvent and then work your way up to reach the solubility parameters of oil paint once you get to the point where you're taking the varnish off of something that the paint will soluble and you to re evaluate whether you can safely do the cleaning without removing the pain and that's where graduate school years of practice and chemistry come into play  so so i was an art history major in college and i was really interested in actually working with the actual objects not studying pictures and box not sort of i was way more interested in how things were made and the nitty gritty than the sort of our historical ideas not that isn't wrong with our history just i didn't see myself continuing and i also took a lot of to your classes i really enjoyed the process of painting i loved the materials but i really didn't have anything to say as an artist so this was a good way for me to get to see sort of take some of my interests and mold them together so after college you need a lot of chemistry and i didn't take all my chemistry as an undergraduate s as a year off a tween graduate school and college and took organic chemistry and then i applied to graduate school and i went to grad school in canada actually there's very few programs that teach to have a master's program in our conservation and i got into one in canada and i went there and then i came home just to give you an idea there's like four graduate schools that do it and they usually take about five people a year so there's about ten conservators working on all the different materials paper objects paintings in the state of maine and our national organisation i think it's about three thousand members but there's not there's not a lot of people who do it there's a lot of work to be done there's there's not a lot of money to heat pressure and sometimes vapor a little bit of water to get the area to lie down flat because often the terror is special in that painting because if it's if it's been torn for a while the canvas starts a pull away and then you bridge the tear with different materials and sometimes if you do it if it's a big  a to do it's called the lining which is where you actually take the paying off the structure and here another piece of canvas to the paper to the back of the canvas and then you restructure it up again on the structure so it has to lairs and a lot of the paintings you see in museums that are older have had this process called lining so right exactly yes yes and again you want to use materials that you'll be able to take off without harming the original so you know when you something like the toughest job i've done i've done a lot of jobs i did do a painting that was very badly torn because and this is a cautionary tale because someone had transported a painting in the car with their dog and the  dog had the painting was wrapped in one of those moving quilts and the dogs thought of this is a nice place to lie down and it you know dogs kind of like go like this and they often turn around three times and lead the exactly what it looks like the painting had like two large job but actually because that the are the owners called me and i got to it before all of the canvas crawled away and tranq once you laid it down flat you were really able to reattach all of its hair and it came together a list beautiful and it was done but that's kind of my most want to say one thing quickly the sleigh in the corner back there which has a really beautiful painted i would say a fruit and floral motif on it one part of the paint was going to look much brighter and richer and that's an area that i applied