Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

One place I know I don’t want to go is Antarctica.    This is not to say that I think Antarctica is dull or something like that (I like the idea of auroras, bright stars, and a frozen, treeless tundra), it’s just that it’s cold in a kind of deathly way.  But recently I’ve been hooked on reading about a team of dedicated art conservators working at Scott Base. Their Antarctic Conservation Blog is hosted by the British Natural History Museum.

I’m not really sure how productive I would be in -40 degree weather (really, who wants to sleep in a snow filled bedroom or use a frozen porta-potty, Read the rest of this entry »

For reasons I’ll explain later, I’ve been digging around on youtube.com and other places for videos about art conservation . Today I found one of my all-time favorite videos about conservation.

It’s a video of Grant Romer of the George Eastman House talking about the famous Abraham Lincoln glass plate negative. I think there’s a lot to like about this video: it’s a great subject; the video is well produced (note that this “video” is made entirely from still images); and I think Grant Romer’s voice sounds a lot like William Carols Williams’. What’s not to like?

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The comments in my last post about our new computed radiography (CR) system spurred me into writing a second post about this topic.

In the comments on that last post Karen T discussed the importance of being able to make a 1:1 comparison between a radiograph and a painting, and then Christina responded with some first-hand experience with our new system. I confess, though: I cheated a bit and asked Christina to answer that question because, after all, Christina is an experienced paintings conservator here at the IMA, and I’m not.

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Warning: This post is somewhat technical, kind of lengthy, and it has an example of early recycling near the end.

A former professor of mine recently called with some technical questions about the Conservation

Department’s new x-ray equipment. Instead of responding to him via e-mail I thought I would provide a kind of open response here. And why not, right? It just might be interesting to you and perhaps also to my colleagues in the conservation world. Besides, in my mind, the IMA’s blog seems to be the perfect place to discuss x-radiography considering the previous non sequiturs of Cheesecake and Redbuds.

I’m a little worried, though, because I doubt many of the folks upstairs realize that we have the capacity to produced x-rays down here in the basement and this might make them a bit nervous. I think it’s fair to say that most people have a fear of x-rays for good reason, because they have the potential to change humans on the atomic level, and that’s unnatural at best; but, trust me, we’ve taken a lot of safety precautions to make sure that all of the x-rays that we produce stay in the room that they are produced in. The room is an enclosed space that is lined all the way around with an 1/8 of an inch of lead. We use a Geiger counter to confirm that this room is successfully containing the energy.

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As I get ready for another busy summer of maintaining the outdoor sculptures here at the IMA, I thought I would share some information about some work I completed last summer with the fine help of intern Cydney Campbell (she is also an undergrad at Herron and a world-renown Irish dancer – here’s a picture of her in mid dance).

During the muggiest weeks of August we completed a pretty major treatment on one of the more important sculptures on the Oldfields estate, the Three Graces. Consisting of a solid piece of carved white marble perched on a limestone base, the sculpture had become pretty dirty over recent years. Here’s how it look before we got started:

Side note #1, though we have a good idea of when and why the sculpture was placed in this important location of Percival Gallagher’s landscape design we don’t have a clear sense of who actually made it. (Side note #2, I desperately wanted to put a link to Gallagher’s Wikipedia article, but sadly one doesn’t exist. There is some info on him in the book Pioneers of American Landscape Design, published by LALH)

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