Author: Grace Victoria Osbourne

A new jam! Natalia has excelled herself with another lovely batch of strawberry. She labelled the jar in Portuguese and English. We think this may have been so that we will stop asking her what the flavour is. Or because she knows how much we love it. It might just be to do with the recent influx of English speakers- two Brits and three Americans this week!

Today has been an interesting but more difficult day for  both of us.

I started the day with the varnish removed on half of my painting.

The good news is that the varnish is very easy to remove and the difference is pretty striking. The removal has revealed some beautiful colours and allows us to distinguish the brush strokes more more. I am very happy with the treatment so far in this respect.

There is bad news too and I have to write about it because we’re not doing this blog to make ourselves look great. We’re doing it to show  how much we’re learning.

The bad news is that I removed more varnish than I should have. I wasn’t aware beforehand but it is not common practice to remove the varnish on the signature of a painting so I continued to remove it like I had in the other areas.

There are several reasons why the varnish should not be removed:

1.The signature is one of the most important parts of a painting.

2.The varnish protects the signature.

3. The signature is usually the last thing to be added to the painting so may not have bonded to the other areas of paint as strongly.

4. The abrasive nature of the cotton swabbing may loosen pigments.

Fortunately it does not look like I have removed any important information and I will never forget this lesson! There was still a small area of varnish that I hadn’t removed and I have taken care to ensure that I will not take it off.

I also had a little panic that I had removed to much paint on the left hand side of the painting as the cotton swabs were much blacker and I began to expose white areas. However, Manuel assured me that the cotton swabs were coming back darker because of the pigments that were loosened when the wood split and because some areas that may have been retouched.

And now I have rambled about me and my day, I will tell you about Issy’s. We both figured that now we’re working on seperate projects we will probably write a bit more about ourselves and our experiences on our blog day so you will have more details on Issy’s work on her sculpture.

Today Issy started her day by recleaning areas where dirt had bloomed as a result of the previous cleaning processes.

She had also noticed that many cracks and fractures had been revealed during the cleaning process and had to record them in her drawings.

After lunch Issy experimented with tinting Milliput using powder pigments. She didn’t have much luck with this endeavour- even when she tried using stronger pigments such as “Burnt Turkey Umber” and mixing the pigments with water. The Milliput only changed colour very slightly but she will retouch the restoration later using some type of paint with a matt finish to match the rest of the sculpture.

Issy also had issues when trying to create the shape of the thumb in a form that matched the shape and size of the thumb on the opposite hand. She was altering it for hours and ended the day thinking it still looked slightly too fat for the hand. Its a tricky restoration to create as it is viewed from so many different angles and because she is creating it using a material that is such a different colour to the rest of the sculpture. She decided that she ought to come back to it on Monday with fresh eyes!

Have a good weekend everyone!

 

Here is Friday I’m In love by The Cure to get you started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGgMZpGYiy8

 

Today Natalie revealed that the latest jam flavour is- drum roll please- tangerine!

Also, all of our family and friends in Britain who have been complaining about the weather will be consoled to know that Brazil is forecast rain all week and its so chilly that I walk a coat and boots today! I’m sat in a jumper and I’m freezing! This isn’t what we came here for Brazil!

We felt on top of things when we walked into the museum today.

We greeted everyone in Portuguese… the security guards at the gate, the maintenance guys, the receptionists and all of the conservators. Then we got into the lab and cracked on without bothering Ana or Priscilla or anyone else! We’re like real Pinacoteca conservators…kind of.

I really want to put some photos up from today but I think I might have to just add some on later because our Internet is feeling under the weather.

We used the large communal packed lunch heater which was pretty exciting for us (our kicks are still small, we’re just far away!)

Other than that things have been progressing quite quickly with our projects!

Issy removed the Agar and cleaned the remaining surface dirt using cotton swabs and water. She cleaned the black mould off the papyrus underwear using the latter method with great effects.

She also removed the hands on the priest part of the sculpture today as they had been readhered poorly in the past using PVA or a similar adhesive that had been covered in plaster. This repair was unstable and unsightly so after consulting the other conservators at the Pinacoteca, Issy removed them using a scalpel and acetone to dissolve the adhesive where necessary.

I finished cleaning the painting and the frame using smoke sponge and then Manuel and I conducted some solvent tests to remove the varnish on the painting. It is necessary to remove the varnish as it has discoloured over time and obscures the original painting.

We tested four solvent combinations in total and concluded that Metil Etil Cetone (MEC) or Methyl Ethyl Ketone (MEK) in English was the best choice in terms of removing the varnish efficiently and without harming the original painting.

Removing the varnish makes an instant  and very apparent difference to the painting akin to Barry Scott’s penny test (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGooQ8yYC0c) and raises one of the biggest conservation questions about how clean an object should be.

Many people may know and love this painting as it is now with yellowed, aged-looking colours and will be adverse to seeing the bright, original colours. They may also argue that the varnish is part of the object’s history.

However, it is likely that the varnish has discoloured overtime and the artist did not originally intend to create a painting with the dull, toned down colours that are now visible. Additionally, during the removal of the varnish today we discovered some abrasions of the pigments so it is possible that the varnish was added to cover these and was not part of the artist’s original plan for the painting.

There are plenty of other theoretical and scientific details that I could ramble on about but this isn’t an essay so we’ll save that for another time.

Hopefully the Internet will be back to its speedy self soon and this blog will be filled with colour again.

Until then!

 

 

 

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!