Another day, another wonderful breakfast. So much love for the jam.
Also we are now masters of the Brazilian electric shower! You have to listen for the grumble of the resistance and once you have that the power of hot water is yours!
Today we had a realisation about the toilet system that English people might find strange- we were surprised by it- and thought it was worth a mention! If you can’t take the nitty gritty of everyday life and only want to hear about conservation and culinary delights then don’t read until after the picture of the orange sign.
The idea had been building up over time: the strange sign above the sink in our hostel. The bin that was permanently filled with tissue in our hostel. The bins in all of the toilets at the museum.
We are meant to put used toilet paper in the bin rather in the toilet? We are still in serious debates and discussions about this issue but it is looking likely.
There is a habit here that we picked up straight away and love! Some Brits do it anyway, others don’t and we never have done.
Brushing your teeth at lunch time. Everyone here does it!
On Monday everybody cracked out their toothbrushes after lunch and went off to the loos. Issy and I had both indulged in an onion fest and breathed on enviously with our pungent breath, but on Tuesday, Wednesday and today we had the minty freshness of the rest of Sao Paulo! This routine is returning to England with us and we will never bother anybody with an afternoon of lunch odours again.
So now that I have just spent twenty minutes updating you on our hygiene situation, I will get back to the good stuff (though not before giving you a link to everybody’s favourite post-shower song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JfEJq56IwI )
We got into work this morning and peeled off the Agar! Its so satisfying that its one of those conservation jobs that everybody acknowledges as being a treat to do. Think of peeling PVA glue off your hands or a face mask off your face.
After the peeling stage, we used an air compressor and tweezers to remove pieces of Agar from the trickier areas of the object.
The treatment was mainly successful. You can’t over apply Agar but you can create an uneven finish if you use different concentrations (we used 5% in water). The agar can leave streaks of dirt if it is not applied evenly and it can also clean unevenly if it is poured on at different temperatures (I’m sorry if that sentence doesn’t sound right, rather than getting better at Portuguese I’m getting worse at English!) The last two problems can be rectified with more applications of the same concentration of Agar or small areas can be cleaned using cotton swabs dampened with tap water (Tatiana said that it is not necessary to use deionized in this instance as Brazilian water does not have too many minerals).
The majority of the sculpture was cleaned evenly after the first Agar treatment. Tatiana felt that it would be worth applying another layer of Agar allover the sculpture again as the areas of remaining dirt that were fairly large and distributed everywhere.
We learned that the subject of the sculpture relates to a specific Portuguese missionary who converted indigenous Brazilians to Christianity. Its interesting to work on art that depicts such an important theme in Brazil’s history.
Our second layer of Agar was quite effective but there are still stains remaining that we will have to remove using cotton swabs.
We really like the idea of visitors to the gallery being able to look in on the conservators and we saw several passing tours, including schools, stopping by when we were working. Its great for the public to see what is happening to their artwork and its nice for conservators not to be tucked away out of sight! We’re still getting used to people watching us work though and had a few people pointing at their cameras and trying to get us to wave. This must be how life was for Britney in the height of her Paparazzi days.
We got our second object today.
I will be treating the painting (my first easel painting- woohoo!) and Issy will be treating the frame. The piece is made of wood (or “Madeira” as the Brazilians would say. The cake and the drink help us to remember this one!)
We made some notes and took some rough photographs for a condition report about this object today. The painting is on a wooden substrate that had split in the centre due to fluctuating relative humidity. There is also loss of pigment in several small areas on the front and surface dirt that will need to be removed.
The wooden substrate of the frame has also split in the corners due to changing r.h. and it has losses of the gesso relief moulding. It has been painted rather than gilded so Issy will be retouching any restorations rather than gilding them.
Tatiana spent a long time translating the condition report for the painting for us. It struck me that we might never need to know the Portuguese for “screw” again in our lifetimes but even if we don’t end up working as conservators in Brazil or Portugual, it will be easier to learn conservation terms in other romance languages now that we have a ground to work from. We are also building up a list of terms and vocab that we now know to be essential in conservation/ museum work, which will be useful in all situations where we have to deal with international relations.
We were impressed at the books available for people working in international conservation. The Pinacoteca has two a dictionaries translating museum terms in 5 languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish and German, and a phrase book full of conservation terms in English, Spanish and Japanese. Apparently these are very difficult to find but its great that they exist!
Before any treatment, we will need to examine the objects using methods such as UV and raking light, in addition to taking photographs of them using a digital and a non digital camera. Both cameras are used so that the museum has a digital copy of the images and a copy of the negatives.
We’re looking forward to getting started on the research tomorrow!
Some more notes about our Uvaia companions.
A man from Israel invited us to see Beyonce on Sunday… apparently there are still tickets and they’re about £35 each! It seems like he’s trying to get the whole hostel to go with him.
We also learned more about the quiet French man. He is called Emmanuel and is a computer programmer. He has spent the last few hours sat in front of his computer at the table, with Issy and I sat in front of ours, while I type this up. Its a strange kind of unsociable social but we’re happy and making ourselves at home here!
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