Restoring Paintings.

There's a limit to how much can be restored - and always questions about whether a painting should be restored at all. There was a recent case in which a painting was all but destroyed - I've forgotten just about ALL the details now! But in this case, the damage couldn't have been made worse, so it was worth a try; there was extensive restoration including the re-painting of entire passages. And it worked, in the opinion of most people. These days, professional restorers - and they're the only ones you should entrust a painting to - tend to use materials which could be removed fairly easily by subsequent restorers, given the ghastly reconstruction work done to some paintings by Victorian restorers who more or less re-painted the whole picture. with inferior pigments. A modern restorer will go to great trouble only to use, say, a lead white, and provided they're lightfast, traditionally made colours, solvents, and oils. But they leave an option for the future, so that work can be undone or augmented by even better pigments, and rediscovered processes. On the whole, I'm for sensitive restoration - while there's a lot to be said for leaving time to make its contribution to an oil painting (the vast majority of works needing to be restored ARE oils: in the case of watercolour it's the paper that sometimes needs stabilizing: it would be very, very difficult to re-paint passages of a watercolour), if paint is actually falling off the canvas and something can be done about it, then I'm for doing it. Some are beyond help, though. The Malevich painting of a black square for example has decayed and cracked to such an extent that I don't know what's keeping any of the paint on the support - but there's nothing to be done with it except conserve it as best they can rather than attempting restoration. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

A couple of years ago I visited a professional restorer in Bristol, who was cleaning and restoring Sir Joshua Reynolds' first self portrait, for our local Museum. She said that they use spittle (human) to clean old oil paintings and work at it with a cotton bud. No wonder it takes so long to get a good job done. It was a really interesting visit. She keeps quite about the location of her studio and does not advertise as this would invite burglars and the paintings that she works on are really valuable. I was also very surprised that she uses very strong florescent lights to work under. I must admit an excellent job was done. It was also x-rayed, which revealed two other portraits underneath.