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New York-based paper conservator Daria Keynan and Amy Hughes, third-year graduate student at NYU Institute of Fine Arts, shared exciting new contemporary cleaning techniques that have the potential for more effective and efficient treatment of paper-based objects by custom-matching the pH and conductivity modular stock solutions to the original object. This presentation was a wonderful …

  I was looking forward to hearing this talk by Christopher Maines, Conservation Scientist from the National Gallery of Art, on artist materials used by Andy Warhol in his earlier artworks, especially since it mentioned the possibility of traditional materials. Maines began his talk with a brief summary on Warhol’s early techniques as a commercial …

I’m am extremely excited that I signed up to write a blog post for this Paintings Group Session at the  41st Annual Meeting for AIC: The Contemporary in Conservation this week in Indianapolis. As an emerging conservator specializing in the conservation of paintings, I found this discussion very important for our field and I was …

Paintings conservators at the  National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australia, have compiled a database of Artists’ Colourmen stamps, stencils, labels and marks found on artworks in the NGV Collection as a resource for study and interest. The database can be viewed online at: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/conservation/artists-colourmen Companies manufacturing and supplying artist’s materials, from the late Eighteenth Century …

Pacific Standard Time is not just a time zone.  It is also the title of a Getty-funded initiative, jointly launched by the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute, that enabled more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California to tell the story of the art scene in Los Angeles, California.  The initiative focuses on archives, research, exhibitions, publications, …

When Ana Alba was working at the Hirshhorn Museum she undertook a research project on four paintings from Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series.  Her study compared the materials used in each of the paintings and assessed how that tied in to their current condition.  She presented her findings at the 2010 annual meeting in Milwaukee, …

Penschilderijn*, also known as “penpaintings“, involve drawing an image in black ink on top of a substrate prepared with a white lead oil ground.  The technique originated in seventeenth century Holland and was popularized by one of its most skilled practitioners, Willem van de Velde the Elder.  The artist’s painting, Dutch Ships Near the Coast, became …

Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin’s work combines traditional painting and sculpture with nontraditional techniques.  In 1986 he completed his work, The Black Paintings, a series of twenty-two pleated neoprene panels painted with images based on Jean Genet’s play, “The Blacks: A clown show.”  The 14′ long panels hang side by side to create a 28′ x 22′ …

American painter Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was a leading Abstract Expressionist artist.  In November of 2011 the new Clyfford Still Museum opened in Denver, Colorado.  For more than seven years prior to the opening conservators in the ARTEX Conservation Laboratory worked to prepare Still’s paintings for travel and exhibition.  One of those paintings was the oil …

William Wei, Senior Conservation Scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, gave a compelling and entertaining presentation about how art conservators and historians and the scientific community: scientists, chemists and material engineers communicate with each other.  Bill used a very personal style (walking onto the floor and just talking to us rather than standing …

Michael O’Malley gave a fascinating talk about describing the investigation he undertook on a painting he had treated in 1998, which resulted in an attribution.   His determination to uncover the mysteries of the posthumous Portrait of Mére Catherine de Saint-Augustin, a 17th Century Carmelite nun beatified in 1989 was piqued by hints given by materials …

Schwarz paper outlined the extensive and complex treatment, carried out over four years, of 9 40 x 80” lunettes painted by Mowbray for Collis Huntington’s mansion in New York. After a thorough biography and outline of Mowbray’s artistic development, she moved into a description of the nine, brightly colored allegorical female muses depicted on the …

Perez’s talk focused on the comparison and resulting attributions of two painted portraits of Chile’s beloved Fray Camilo Henriques. She first detailed the history and importance of the sitter and the painting itself (this iconographic portrait was the source of most subsequent depictions of the sitter), and then went on to describe the painting and …

The theme of the three talks in the PSG morning session on Thursday revolved around the need for a comparative approach to the examination of works of art. Joseph Barabe’s talk perhaps best exemplifies the benefits of examining a group of works by a single artist comparatively, an approach he used to ultimately disprove the …

As a fitting end to a conference full of great talks, Tiarna Doherty, from the J. Paul Getty Museum, wrapped up the final session of the joint PSG/RATS session at the annual meeting on Friday evening with an incredible talk about new developments in cleaning water-sensitive paintings. The project was a collaboration between herself and …