The conservation treatment of Severin Roesen’s Still Life, from the collection of Conner Prairie, is one of those very rewarding projects. The exquisite details of the painting were obscured beneath several layers of dirt, dust, soot, and heavily discolored natural resin varnish. The vibrant original colors appeared dull, dark, and hazy. The painting was a shadow of what it once had been, but those original colors and details were still there, just deeply buried. Removing all of those layers to once again reveal the beautiful colors of Roesen’s Still Life was not only rewarding to me as a conservator working behind the scenes, but it’s also rewarding to the visitor who now gets to enjoy the painting and all of its details and subtle colors.

Here is the painting in all its glory in the IMA’s Early American galleries. So what went on behind the scenes to get it here? About 85 hours of careful conservation work.

The painting installed in the IMA’s Early American Galleries.

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Filed under: Art, Conservation

For the opening of the new Ancient Art of the Mediterranean gallery, I completed a couple of conservation treatments on objects that haven’t been on view in a long, long time.  One of the objects is this Canosan vase which is from the 3^rd or 2^nd century B.C.E.  Here’s a video of the IMA’s Director and CEO talking about the vessel and the new gallery he curated:

Before this more than 2,000 year old artwork came into my Objects and Variable Art conservation lab, it was safely stored in two separate boxes—one box contained the ceramic vessel, the other contained the 9 pieces that were detached from it.  There’s a photograph in the historical files dating to the early part of the 20^th century showing how the vase was assembled when it was acquired in 1928.

My job was to carefully re-assemble these pieces and fill the missing areas to make the joints appear more seamless.  Finally, I inpainted my fills to make them less visible (if you get up really close to the case, you can see my work).

Aaron Steele, the IMA’s Digital Assets Specialist & Associate Photographer, photographed this object before and after my conservation treatment up in his photo studio.  Have a look:

Before treatment photographs

After treatment photographs

Filed under: Art, Conservation, IMA TV

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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Filed under: Conservation