San Diego Reader

“He’s restored that villa to a fare-thee-well.
That’s the trouble with Americans; all that money and no taste.”

— Jonathan Trevanny,
Ripley’s Game

I: Acquisition

This story begins with an ending: an estate sale in a Hillcrest apartment, scanning the rooms of the deceased, picking through what was left behind. I once heard that Hillcrest used to be referred to as the Gay Nineties, “since everyone there was either gay or ninety.” This particular apartment almost certainly belonged to one of the latter category — everything dim-lit and draped, full of heavy furniture and frilly knickknacks, a bygone elegance gone to seed. And a painting, beat to hell but still displaying the artist’s skill: a painting of a saint, bedecked with robes and halo, writing at a desk while an attendant angel held his inkwell. A writer’s painting — even if you didn’t subscribe to the whole angels-and-haloes scenario, it was a short imaginative jump to seeing the thing as depicting a visit from the Muse. The saint’s hand was raised in surprise as he lifted his head from his paper and beheld the angel, bearing a feather-pen of another color. “Oh, I didn’t see you there! What’s that? Try writing this way? Why, thank you!”

“Sixteenth-century Spanish Colonial,” read the tag. “$400.”

“How much will you take for the painting?”

“Make me an offer,” said the man running the sale, his voice slippery with confident ease.

“How about $75?”

The man’s voice picked up a little grit. “Oh, no. I couldn’t let it go for less than $300. A man came in just a while ago and said he’d pay $500. He said it might appraise for $5000.” (This was some time ago, when Antiques Roadshow was at its cultural peak.) Risible as the claim was, I didn’t argue. I wanted the painting — not for appraisal, but for me. I paid the $300.

For years, the painting hung in my foyer in all its low-rent glory, a sad testament to the fear of becoming bourgeois: “See, I may own a gen-u-ine old-fashioned oil painting in a big gilt frame, but it’s okay — look at that gash in the canvas! Look at the flaking paint! See the ragged edge down there at the bottom! For heaven’s sake, it even looks like somebody ran a strip of duct tape over half the saint’s face! See here, how the canvas is flattened, how the colors are less faded, how bits of paint have been lifted away?”

But when, two years later, you’re driving the kids down to Baskin-Robbins in La Mesa, and there, just across the street, you see the gold-lettered sign for Harrison’s of London, Art & Frame Restoration, Art & Antique Conservators — well, how is a body, bourgeois despite all fears, to resist?

II: Assessment

“Artists are the worst people,” says Milroy Harrison, art restorer, bending my somewhat ruined canvas. “They don’t care what they paint on. These painters, unless they were sponsored, they’d got no money for materials. They’d use any damn thing. I had a painting once that was done on two pieces of plywood; it looked as though the artist had fetched them out of the dustbin.” What’s more, “Those men in the 1800s were making their own varnishes and their own cleaners. Eighty percent of the paintings in museums are finished or restored improperly.”

Some are even begun improperly. “When an artist paints,” says Harrison, “he gets his achievement out of that last day on the easel. For the artist, that’s the end of the painting’s life. But it’s not, really; it’s the beginning of its life. A hundred years later, you might get something like this old German painting.” He gestures at a nearby easel displaying an image of a landscape. Near the top, the hazy blue sky is bulging out, doing an impression of a windshield after some poor soul’s head has slammed into it. “This is what we call ‘cupping’ — there’s air gotten underneath.” Harrison points to the tiny lines radiating out from the bulge’s center. “And this is what we call ‘the spider’s web’ — very soon, it’s going to go out in a circle and start cracking, and the paint will fall off. It’s because it was ill prepared. The undercoat is not even gesso.” Without the animal glue — “the only glue that can be regenerated with water” — in the gesso, the paint has little hope of clinging to the canvas for over a century’s worth of expansions and contractions brought on by changes in temperature and humidity.

But the trouble, in my painting’s case, did not come in the beginning, nor in the finishing. And it had never been restored — not really. A session under a black light convinces Harrison that whatever paint remains on the canvas is original. Newer stuff, laid over the original varnish, would have shown up as dark patches, he explains. The golden vine trailing along the saint’s robe and cloak appears black under the light, and Harrison guesses that, while original, the vine was painted on after the initial painting had dried — a kind of dramatic overlay. Fungus, on the other hand, would show up as white dots; happily, he finds none.

Mostly, the problem is just that the painting is old and was poorly looked after. The fraying along the bottom? “I’ve seen this before. I think this was on a screen in an old stone Catholic church. Then it was propped up in the basement of the church, virtually sitting in water. It’s been cut down — you wouldn’t get an artist cutting off the bottom of the tablecloth like this.”

And after it was cut down, it was glued onto a frame. Not wrapped around a proper stretcher, with blocks at the corners that allow for manual expansion and contraction, but glued to a fixed wooden rectangle. “That’s not good. It’s almost too tight. If anything fell against this, it’d go straight through. The canvas moves all during the day and night.” If the frame can’t be adjusted as the canvas shrinks…

Whether it was the too-tight canvas that caused the great right-angle tear in the painting, we shall never know. But the tear is there and patched by a couple of pieces of brown linen glued to the back of the canvas. “Feel this — it’s like cement,” notes Harrison, tapping the fibers of the original canvas where they are stuck to the linen backing. Farther up, a small hole has received similar treatment.

The back of the canvas also sports an odd symbol that runs off the edge — more evidence for the cut-down theory. Harrison is stumped as to the symbol’s meaning, and it bothers him. But the biggest mystery, the thing that remains stubbornly silent when Harrison says, “We’re trying to get the painting to talk to us,” is the tape. It’s gone now, but its former placement is plainly visible on the painting’s face — long, overlapping rectangles of damage, the flaked paint and brighter colors bearing witness to a protective covering that took a toll when removed. But a gummy residue on the painting’s backside makes it pretty clear that the tape was placed there, not on the front. How to explain the effect? And why was the tape put there in the first place? Its path covers no crack, no fault or tear. A mystery.

Finally, says Harrison, “It’s been scrubbed. Look at the nubs of the canvas” — bare and brown amid the red of the robes. “A painting can have up to seven layers of paint — the last two or three are glazes, to get the depth of color. Those are gone here.”

Restoration will mean, to some extent, replacing what has been removed. “We don’t want to repaint the original,” says Harrison. “We’ll never get it back to 100 percent, but we may be able to get it back to 80 percent.” To do that, he says, “You’ve got to know colors,” know the way they’ll blend when layered and glazed. “You can use black, seal it, put a thin layer of white on, and you’ve got gray — the black bleeds through. Then you can start working with your other tones — your blues and purples. The biggest job in restoring — and this takes years of training — is that you’ve got to figure out how the artist mixed the paint, how he painted, what kind of brush he used. I remember, back when I’d just gotten out on my own, I got an oil painting by Stanfield, a well-known English marine painter. Somebody had put a cigarette through it. Stanfield always did beautiful sunsets, and it took me weeks to get the color of the evening sky. I was going with whites and blues, and then by sheer luck, I put a touch of black in there one night, and bang.

“Some paints are thick,” he continues, “and leave great lines on the canvas. And some are flat and runny. I’ll use a glass palette, and I’ll keep all my warm colors in one place and my cold colors in another place. You put a nub of each color you need in the center, and you keep playing with them. You can always see where you’ve done work, because you did it. But many people can’t.”

< PREVIOUS | NEXT >