Portland Art Museum restoring a Monet painting

[Music] first live local this is Fox 12 now and hello everyone thank you for joining us this is Fox2 now I'm Greg Nibbler we appreciate you being here live streaming with us here on this Friday we're from the Fox 12 Oregon Newsroom uh every weekday starting around 1 p.m. Pacific and you can find us on YouTube for the Fox2 Oregon Channel you can find us at kptv.com or the Fox2 now tab or of course those Fox2 Oregon apps on whatever device you may be on that's a great way to catch up with all the programming we have here and today we're actually going to take you outside of this studio where I'm at right now we got to go on location to the Portland Art Museum and actually go behind the scenes to their new concert ation Center which is where they take all of that amazing artwork that they have down at the Portland Art Museum and make sure that it's maintained and restored it takes a lot of work to do that and one painting in particular they are working on right now is clonet water lies which is an incredible painting there's the entire series of them this is one of them Portland Art Museum has it and we got to sit down with the head conservator and and talk to Charlotte as you can see right there you can see her name on the screen uh talk to her all about how she goes about it you get to see the inside of the room some of the real technical equipment they work on and also we learn a little bit about the science behind actually conserving these paintings so let's jump right into it here it is behind the scenes at the Portland Art Museum with cloud cloud Monet's water [Music] L like many conservators I think I took a bit of a cus route so my parents are doctors I went into undergrad Premed came out with a degree in neurobiology and was like Mom and Dad I want to go to Art School while I was there I happened upon an article in the Sunday newspaper about someone who was a conservator and had my bingo moment of like art plus science together in one profession so you need a pretty deep understanding of organic chemistry in particular to do conservation because I have to understand what I'm bringing to a work of art and how it's going to affect that the M the materials that that work of art are made of and to make sure that one doesn't affect the other but only affects the part of it that I want it to and then the way that I work is I roll these small cotton swabs and then I will wet it up with my solvent mixture and roll it over the surface and the solvent solubilizes the varnish layer and then it sort of gets absorbed onto the cotton fibers and that's how I [Music] work this is a really traditionally painted oil painting so it's something we know a lot about because we have records of what was done to this painting I know exactly what varnish was on it so I had a pretty good starting point [Music] so I I knew when I first got here that this painting should not have been varnished ever so Monae made it be known that he didn't want his paintings to be varnished a lot of the Impressionists didn't want their paintings varnished so when I see a varnish on that painting it's like bingo I already know it shouldn't be there and it really changes the way it looks a lot so you can see I've started working from this corner kind of this way and there's this line so this part I've started removing that varnish so one of the main things the varnish does and one of the main cases you could say for removing it is it saturates colors so it makes them deeper and richer and darker and the way Monae painted he wanted a more pastel like appearance so you can kind of really begin to see that yeah here so above the line you don't get all of these subtle tonalities all those Light blues and the whites you're just getting a much more contrasted more evened out look to things and you you just lose a lot of these really lovely subtle more pastel-like tones when you put a varnish on something most paintings in history are varnish so and most many of his paintings were varnished early on they had a hard time selling them because people were like oh it's not varnished so it's not finished if someone had taken the time to look around they would have said oh 90% of his paintings are varnished so we didn't understand we didn't have the background no one had Unearthed all the material to let us know that he did not want them to be varnish the type of varnish that it is remains kind of soft so to speak speak so it's taken on a lot of sort of dust and grime over the 50 years it's been on there so it actually has quite a gray cast to it as I'm taking it off just cuz stuff gets stuck in its surface of that softness of that [Music] varnish so I work very small so I might do like a 3X3 in area over a day at most the project is sort of planned to be finished at the end of the year and it'll come close so we kind of take a an oath that we treat everything equally so whether I'm working on your grandmother's portrait or this I try to come to it with the same mindset and the same respect at this point so many people have come and are interested in this project that I am constantly reminded of um what a privilege is it it is for me to be working on this I think also you know as a conservator you sit in front of this painting like this far away from it hours at a time months at a time and so you have this amazing appreciation just for the Artistry of the artist all of these um water lies were originally this purple color and he went in at some point and put the green and blue over them he did it himself he did it himself yeah and you can see like where he's there was a water lily here at some point that he then edited out like he makes a lot of adjustments which is why the year for this is actually 1914 215 cuz he worked on it for over a year you can kind of see like these Blues go over everything else and this blue goes over everything else they were some of the last brush Strokes that he did and you know you kind of I don't know sometimes I guess it gives me goosebumps to think about just think about he was he's so good he's 73 when he's doing this like he's so good at what he's doing and he knows exactly what he wants to do so it really doesn't take much yeah I mean I I get that like just seeing these brush strokes and like this is him he put those there yeah he was here in front of this D doing that how do you think it's going to feel when you're done with this one I think it will feel good actually I'll be excited to put it back on view and have it look the way that he wanted it to look because it's never really been shown here without the varnish since it happened really at the time of acquisition so it'll be the first time people get to see it the way he wanted people to see it see it in the exciting [Music] y I mean there's so many interesting things happening in this room you know You' got the air clean 4,000 workstation I'm assuming that's so it's called a fume hood and it's if we mix up solvent mixtures or work with the chemicals we work with some of them you definitely don't want to breathe right and so we do that mixing in there so it has a dedicated EXO system so my specialty is paintings conservations and my colleague Karen is a objects conservator so this is the project that she's currently working on we have a photography setup is what this is here so we do full documentation before we start we do documentation while we are conserving it and then we'll document it when we're done so that there's whole record that'll be with that painting no matter where it is yeah these weird looking exhaust trunks or you can hear them call snorkel trunks so because of the chemicals and solvents we work with we need a way to pull them out of the space so that the people who are in the space and working don't breathe them in we were talking before and it looks like one of those kind of like old perm that people used to have shout out to my Aunt Judy she had one of [Music] those well when you look at having something like this here you know at the Portland Art Museum like how important and how much does it mean to have this kind of a room this ability here at this Museum to me it means a lot and I think for the museum also it's a huge step and a huge commitment it's the first sort of purpose-built dedicated face space for conservation that has ever existed at this Museum so there have been other conservators and other Studios but they've kind of been other spaces that got turned into conservation Studio but this is the first time we've had a purpose-built space it is really exciting so instead of adopting an office oring an office this is the office this the entire purpose of this that's it's just the combination of science and art in here I think is just something that's really amazing and and obviously what you're what you're perfectly aligned uh career has has brought you into I think um you know for everybody out there who is a fan of the Portland Art Museum who is going to be coming and clearly there's a lot of amazing changes that are happening here yes uh but what would you say to them about how valuable it is to have this here it's it's extremely valuable so I know people don't think about it but you go into a museum there's a wide variety of objects and none of them would be here if people hadn't taken care of them along the way and so it's kind of the thing that you don't think about but it's always going on in the background and I think one of the things we would like to do is make it a little less in the background and make it a little more sort of welcoming and open and just let people know that we're here and what we're doing and why they get to see a 600y old sculpture that still looks really good yeah it's because of people taking care of them exactly all that time well this is definitely bringing it out into the light a little bit more and uh I've certainly learned a lot already just being in here about all this hard work that you do so thank you for having us you know really really appreciate it this is this is amazing and uh I am going to look at Art a little bit of different in a different way [Music] now there we go so uh again thank you to the port art museum for having us out there and thank you to Charlotte for showing us all of that and just how it how it all happens and just how much work goes into that seriously even though I said it there at the end of it I'm going to look at things in art museums a lot differently now understanding how important that is conserving these things and maintaining them over all of those years and years in decades sometimes hundreds of years as uh she even mentioned uh also uh thank you to amarie for editing that here I really appreciate that and James Sparks for shooting that for us when we went out there and uh visited the art museum and thank you to the art museum for having us back there uh for everyone watching this is Fox 12 now this is your first time seeing the show I appreciate you finding us and we have a lot of ments for you to check out just head to the Fox2 Oregon YouTube channel under the Fox2 now tab or go to kptv.com click on the Fox2 now tab there or the highly recommended way is to download the Fox2 Oregon app and that way you have everything that we're doing right there for this show and for the other shows here as that uh that we all that we have at Fox 12 Oregon uh it is Friday so thank you for joining us coming up at 2 p.m we're going to have the Fox2 weather podcast video Edition we've got another segment coming up at 1:30 p.m. talking about a day uh coming up here September 8th uh Sunday which will be 988 day so it's about Mental Health crisis and for people who are going through that and just a reminder of ways that you can reach out and get help so that's coming up at 1:30 p.m. if you are watching live that's about 15 minutes away or so and uh I will be right back here on whatever platform you are on I'll see you then I'm Greg Nibbler this is foox 12 now