June 5 Return to Peebles Island

So today we returned to Peebles Island. This time though, we did not go on a nature walk, we visited the Art Restoration Center. We had a little bit of a mix up when we signed in, they had us down for one o clock and we showed up at 9:30, we made it work though. We had two tour guides, Michelle Williams, who was the paper conervator, and Claire, the intern. The Art Restoration center is a part of New York State Parks, Recreation, and Conservation of Historic Site; they have 180 parks and 35 historic sites. Claire explained to us that there were only four schools in North America that offer a conservation certificate; these being NYU in the City, Queens University, a school in Buffalo, and a school in Ontario. I thought this was pretty interesting because I couldn't imagine the competition to get into these schools. From our introduction, we moved into the labs.

Sign from the old factory

We started out in the Textile lab, where we spoke to Deborah Turpin. She was working on a sofa from Mills Mansion that had been there since 2003. The picture below shows the fabric that was used to restore the sofa, it took six years to get this fabric, since it is not being made anymore. I couldn't believe that she had sent the sofa back just the day before we were there. It was at the conservation center for eleven years. That is crazy!! Deborah also showed us another sofa that she was working on. She used zip ties to hold the springs together underneath the sofa, and she was working on getting the fabric for the sides and back of the sofa. One thing that I though was pretty cool is the flag exhibit that we saw at the State Capitol had just come from the Conservation Center. The lady that worked on them wasn't there but it was still pretty cool.

Sample of Fabric used to restore a couch

So when we left the textile lab, we moved onto paintings. Mary was the paintings conservator. She mostly works on portraits, though she also works on landscapes. She showed us a before and after picture of a painting that she restored, it was pretty amazing. She used microscopes to reweave the canvas back together where she claimed that a cow kicked it, who knows what really happened to it though. Once she had the tear fixed, she cleaned and brightened the coloration. I though this was pretty neat. There was a Frederic Church painting there that had some controversy around it. It was a painting from Church's early years, he was about 19 or 20 when he painted it, and it was called an untouched painting, meaning it hadn't been restored yet. This was pretty interesting considered we went to Olana and it makes me think how many of the paintings there are untouched? From the Painting lab we moved onto the Frames Lab. It was here that we talked to Eric and Abby. Abby was working on gilding a painting. She was using sheet of 23 carat gold and pretty much painting them on this frame. I give her props considering it takes a lot of patience to do this and that is something that I don't have. We also looked at the mirrors from the state capitol that we were told to ask for. These frames were from the late eighteenth century and they were gorgeous. Eric told us that he had done some work on them already, but there was still more to do. He also believes that the one mirror is a replica of an eighteenth century mirror because of the materials used to make it.

Gilding a Frame

From the frame lab we moved to wood and furniture. David was the man that we talked to here. He resembled a young Andor, according to a few of the girls, I can see it. He was working on conserving wooden chairs. These chairs were very simple, yet elegant. I really enjoyed them. Claire also talked to us here. She was working on a towel rack, which was unusual because towel racks were not usually saved. She was also working on a table. They both explained to us that everything they do can be reversed, just in case they found evidence that an artifact looked different. Many of the material they use are water solvent. I think this is a pretty good idea because new evidence is always being found. I found it interesting that David said most of the time, servant furniture is more preserved in it's original form than the family furniture because they are used less. From here we moved onto the paper lab. Michelle, our original tour guide, works here. She is working on many of the Frederic Church documents and photographs from Olana. She explained to us that she has researchers coming to the conservation center to look through all of these documents and pictures. One thing I really enjoyed on this tour was how passionate the conservators were. I have sincere hopes that one day I will be just as passionate about my career as they are about theirs.

Frederic Church drawing that has been Conserved

Since we were already on Peebles Island, we decided to eat lunch here. We sat on the picnic benches and enjoyed our lunch. Everyone disliked Katie and Kasianna this time because they were given chocolate chip cookies, while the rest of us suffered through sugar cookies. On our way back to campus, we stopped at lock 2 of the Erie Canal. We got to see a boat go through the lock which was pretty interesting, I have never seen this before. It took about a half hour from when the boat entered until it exited. That wasn't too long considering the boat was going up about 33 feet. The water filled up pretty fast, and it gets me excited to go into them during the last week. We finished our day with book club. We had an intellectual conversation about Quinn's book. May I just say that it was the weirdest book I had ever read. All in All it was a great day.

Lock 2 informational sign

Opening the lock

1908 Gearing system for the valves