Category: The Pinacoteca

Jam update: the last of the strawberry and tangerine ( it tastes like caramelised marmalade, but slightly too caramelised) So tomorrow hopefully there will be a new jam. YAY!

Another normal day at the museum, friendly greetings to the security guards and then all of the staff, we are starting to perfect our Portuguese “good morning”…after three weeks!

We both set back to work on our pieces, Grace today has had a good day applying a layer of Paraloid B72 in Xylene 1:5 to the surface of her painting to create a layer in-between the original and her re-touching. She has also taken lots of very interesting raking light photographs to show the texture of the paint on the surface and researched into suitable paints for re-touching.

My day today started off by sewing the tie on my apron back off as yesterday I pulled it off! I then looked at my previous retouching on the thumb and decided to leave it as it is for the moment, I think I might add a pale terracotta colour coat over the top, but at the moment I am now sure. I have also started to colour match the previous restorations fill around the base of the sculpture.

I have also finished drilling the holes with a Dremmel for the armatures, in both the main sculpture and the hand. Yesterday one drill bit broke off within the hole and another was blunted by the hard ceramic body, even when I wetted it to make it softer the ceramic would not give way and allow for a deeper hole. But today I have succeeded after Manuel went and brought a new sharp drill bit!

Manuel has also come up with a mould removing solution, synthetic saliva! This is swabbed on with cotton wool to the surface and it removed the horrible black mould. Simple and effective. I am pleased now as it is starting to look like it did after I had originally cleaned it, lets hope for no more mould.

We have also been given another project to work on together, a large contemporary piece made from copper strips and rubber tubing. It forms a hammock shape and is around 5 meters long. It is going on loan to a museum in Rio and we have to clean and prepare it for exhibition as it has been in storage for five years.

 

These last few days have been so great for sweet food, Ana introduced us to peanut butter cubes, they are harder than normal jar peanut butter, but so very addictive and yummy! We are planning to bring lots home already. Then Pricilla brought in some super yummy chocolate Florentine type things, they are so good. I could eat them all day long, Brazilians certainly have a sweet tooth!

We also met Daphne, how works for the Pinacoteca’s educational programme, we are going to visit her and her colleagues soon and see what they get up too, this also means we will get to know more about the special interactive pictures Grace mentioned yesterday.

Today has been horrible and just like England, we will hope for some sun this weekend. Last night was very cold and tonight Gustavo (our hostel owner) gave us another blanket each, so tonight we will be lovely a warm.

Me again! We’re up to date now that I”m writing about Tuesday!

Today we cracked on with a bit of restoration!

Issy’s adventures were more interesting than mine so I’ll start with those.

Issy carried on painted her retouching of the finger using watercolours. Due the changing appearance of the colours depending on the lighting conditions (that’s right conservation nerds- I’m talking about Metamerism!) and the fact that the hand is viewed from so many angles, she is still not happy with her result so far and will return to it tomorrow.

After she decided to take a break from colour matching, Issy moved onto using a drill to create holes in the arm and hand for the armature.This process was very difficult and time consuming. The terracotta is so hard to drill into that the drill attachment turned red with heat . One drill attachment broke inside the hand, while  the main body burned and bent another drill bit.

Her drilling endeavours were successful in the end and the bamboo stick armature fits into the holes perfectly.

She will put some photos on here when she next has her camera handy!

My job today was to fill the hole at the top of the painting.

I experimented with different filling materials in a spare piece of wood.

I chose to use Modostuc, an acrylic based filling material which is similar to Polyfilla but is especially design for filling wood. All the materials would have been suitable but I chose not to use the conservation-specific synthetic filler, Mastic as it is no longer in production and the museum only has a small amount left. I chose not to use the gesso-based, Stucco Per Restauro as it was the most difficult to level. I protected the front and back of the painting using magic tape.

I also wanted to talk about a project at the Pinacoteca that we thought showed originality, innovativity and thoughtfulness.  16 of the most famous paintings in the museum’s collection were selected to be made into a tangible form so that it could experienced by visitors who could not see the paintings. The paintings are also used in workshops for school groups.

I also had to use tweezers and the x4 magnifying glasses to remove cotton wool fibres that had become stuck to the painting during the removal of the varnish. It is important that I remove all cotton wool fibres as I will coat the painting with a layer of Paraloid (more on that in the next few days!), which can cause them to darken and become more obvious over time.

 

 

This particular resin object was undergoing treatment in the conservation studio. A crack was forming on the left hand side and was consolidated using Loctite adhesive. Loctite is the same very strong adhesive that Issy used to bond the broken necklace sculpture  in the Jardem de Luz on our first day.

Weather is still pretty abysmal here. Hostel is quiet: Issy, Emmanuel, anonymous new lady, lovely Columbian lady who I have been talking to in (broken) Spanish, Mia, Mia’s friend and me. We had a proper conversation with a Uvaia regular we’ve long known as Tall Moustache for the fact that he is tall and has a moustache. He’s very friendly and introduced us to his flight attendant friend who was popping over while he is in Sao Paulo. He spoke about the many virtues of being a flight attendant- its sounds like a great job!

I hope that you’re all hunky dory!

Today was the day when all washing dreams came true, after breakfast and strawberry jam and a short taxi ride we arrived at the laundrette. A friendly assistant helped us load 5 loads (!)  into the machines and we watched them clean all of the last two weeks away. It was great, but took a long time and we missed a morning at the museum. But if we had not done our washing we would not have any clean clothes to wear for the rest of the week! Of course we checked with Teodora beforehand, who was absolutely fine with us doing this as I am not sure the museum would have not wanted the two English interns to turn up in dirty clothes for a week!

When we arrived back at the museum, everyone in the department was so very kind and all offered separately to wash our clothes in their machines for us, we can not thank them enough for their kindness and we will probably be taking them up on their kind offers.

Once all of the washing excitement had died down, we set back to work on our main projects.

Unfortunately though when I took off the cover of my sculpture it revealed this…

 

MOULD!

 

I think this has happened because of the water used within the organic agar, growing mould within the humid environment of Brazil and the labs, even though they are more controlled there is still a high humidity level that meant the water could evaporate properly.

So I tried a few things to remove the mould, a vacuum and soft toothbrush to remove the fluffy mould then a alcohol ethyl and water solution sprayed on and again brushed. This unfortunately did not remove the black mould on the surface, so tomorrow I am thinking of trying another layer of agar but using a solvent within it, one that Tatiana had recommended before to remove dirt and hopefully help to stop the mould growth.

Today I have also prepared the bamboo armatures to attach the hand with, by coating them in a layer of Paraloid B72 and Xilol 1:5 (or Xylene in English) to seal the sticks before they are put into the sculpture.

 

Grace today has carried on removing the retouching and discovered that there was more paint retouching than she originally thought, because of this she has stopped removing the existing retouches as they are not actually harming the painting. If she did remove all of the previous restoration, she would have to obviously retouch the missing areas, but she would not have enough original information to be able to recreate the image as it currently is.

 

Another task Grace completed today was to remove a fragment of newspaper from the middle top of the painting. She used a scalpel to slowly peel it away from the surface.

For supper this evening we had mushroom pasta, that was very tasty. The hostel is quite tonight just us, one girl and Emanuel our French friend.

It is also pouring down with rain and thundering, it is like we have never left England!

Goodnight Brazil, Good morning England, I hope everyone at home has a superb Tuesday.

 

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