Fine art gleams after a scrub and touchup

It’s a dirty job, but a River Forest man is happy to restore museum paintings for free

By Joseph Ruzich
Special to the Tribune
Published July 21, 2006

Sometimes when Barry Bauman is done with his high-tech cleaning of paintings, he revels in their original splendor.

Take the cleaning he is doing of an early 1920s landscape painted by Oak Park artist Louis Hovey Sharp.

For years, the painting, hung on a wall at the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest, portrayed the ocean scene as dark and somber because of the accumulation of dirt and grime.

Now the painting’s original bright and colorful image of land meeting water is being uncovered.

Without the expertise of painting conservators like Bauman, many paintings would eventually become unrecognizable because of dirt, oil and wax.

Bauman of River Forest is offering his service free to the historical society, much as he does to museums and other not-for-profit institutions. The institutions are only required to pay for the supplies.

“Museums can’t afford to keep the lights and heat running,” said Bauman. “Conservation is very expensive. So I thought I would service their needs. My reward is being able to work on magnificent works of art.”

Since starting Barry Bauman Conservation in 2004, he has worked without charge at more than 70 institutions, including the Phoenix Art Museum, Indiana State Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

He has restored 300 historical paintings by such artists as John Singer Sargent, Anthony van Dyck, Alessandro Magnasco, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Sanford Robinson Gifford and Henry Tanner.

Bauman, who has a master’s degree in art history from the University of Chicago, studied painting restoration while working for the Art Institute of Chicago.

He also was a visiting conservator with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1983 he created the Chicago Conservation Center, which he said was thelargest private restoration facility in the United States. In January 2004, he sold his business and began volunteering full time.

“I was very successful with my business, but my company was running me instead of me running the company,” said Bauman. “I wanted to work on the paintings from start to finish, which I couldn’t always do while running a business.”

Bauman, 58, said there are three steps to restoring a painting. The first layer of dirt and film is removed by using a microscope and cotton swabs dipped in solvents.

Organic solvents are used to take off discolored varnishes, oils and waxes. Next, the painting is examined to make sure it is structurally secure; this may include repairing tears on the canvas.

The last step is to retouch any missed or chipped areas with paint.

Diane Hansen, research center director at the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest, said the historical society decided to have the piece restored because it hangs in a place where visitors often congregate.

“You can already see in the cleaned area that the painting is much brighter and the colors jump out,” she said. “I even notice more details.”

Bauman said he has no plans to stop working. “How many people love their job so much that they would work for free?,” said Bauman.

“Conservators come and go. In the end, no one knows who did the restoration. But to have a historical work of art in pristine condition is my reward.”

News Today – Arts Collection

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… Odd as it might sound, Wall and his manssiere probably won’t look especially out of place tonight, when he attends the American Visionary Art Museum’s first …

The art of quilting

By Tanya Foubert
Wednesday July 19, 2006

Barbara West stands in front of her quilt called Myths of our Time: Intelligent Design, which won the National Award of Excellence for innovative quilts from the Canadian Quilters Association. Tanya Foubert

Canmore Leader — The story goes that a well-known scientist was giving a public lecture on astronomy. The talk went through the planets and how they orbit the sun and in turn the sun orbits our galaxy.

When the scientist, who some say was Bertrand Russell, finished, a little old lady says to him: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The professor surprised by such a remark wittily retorts: “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” says the lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Looking at a work of art created by Barbara West one sees this story, told in the beginning chapter of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, brought to life.

Eight colourful giant Galapagos island tortoises sit one on top of the other balanced by a cane on either side.

At the top the earth sits precariously balanced on the back of an orange-shelled turtle.

At almost seven feet tall the piece is not done in a traditional artistic medium; it is a quilt.

Called Myths of our Time: Intelligent Design, the quilt recently won West the National Award of Excellence for Innovative Quilts from the Canadian Quilters Association.

“I thought it would be kind of interesting to poke some fun at it,” West says of the intelligent design debate.

West’s creations are works of art that come out of her love for quilting. She says she thinks through what she is trying to say with each one and that part of her goes into them.

“When I put my art out there I have to let it speak for itself,” West says. “I feel that in some ways I am exposing some personal heart of myself through my art and it’s available in a way I usually wouldn’t speak about.”
The artistic quilt also won an award here in Canmore at the annual juried exhibition for the Canmore Artists and Artisans Guild.

It won second prize for the people’s choice award this spring.

“There were a lot of different media in that particular show,” says Terry Southwood with the guild. “I just thought it was very well done, very imaginative.

“The quilting group in Canmore does some very imaginative stuff. Not what you would traditionally think of as quilts.”

The Mountain Cabin Quilters Guild in the valley promotes the original aspects of quilt making West is so good at. This includes the annual Vision show, which is an exhibit of art quilts in Canmore. West was one of the founding members after she began quilting in the early ‘90s.

Needlework was something she says her mother taught her when she was young. She gave it up to pursue a career and thought that she could never be an artist. Then when she moved to the valley in 1989 she began searching for things to do.

A conference looking at women’s definitions of their roles in society today brought quilting to her attention.

She says that a woman had brought a healing quilt friends had made while she had breast cancer.

“I started thinking about the whole process of quilting. From there I never looked back,” West says.

After a short while traditional block quilting started to get boring for West who wanted to try something different and more creative.

What makes a quilt non-traditional, says West, can be how its put together or its colour or it can be something that is not quilting at all.

In 2003 West won the same award for innovative quilting for another quilt one would not expect to be a quilt.

“The first time I thought it was a fluke,” she modestly says. “They probably made a mistake or something but (the second) time I felt good.”

The first quilt to win is called Mandalas of Science: Thalassicolla Pelagica. It shows a form of plankton drawn by Ernst Haeckel in Radiolarien during 1862.

That quilt also went to the World Quilt Conference in Japan in 2004.

In the same year West won the prize for innovative small quilt for a piece she made for her daughter Robin before she was to move away to go to school.

During a family trip to France during her last year in high school Robin fell in love with the art of Picasso. The quilt became, after much thought and work, a cozy Picasso rendition.

West’s passion pushes her to continue to try different things all the time and to learn new techniques.
Right now she is taking a course from a textile art school in London England.

She says quilting is her passion and although the administration side of her success is a bit time consuming she has no plans to stop creating her art.

Art as investment, cautionary tales

Stocks or bonds are almost certain to make investors a profit over five years, but art has a high chance of declining in value, the brokerage company said. The probability of losses on small-cap stocks, corporate bonds and long-term treasury bonds is 3% or less if they’re held for five years. Art investors have a 17% chance of losing money over five years, Merrill Lynch said.

Soaring prices for art stirred interest from banks and dealers in 2004, when about 12 art funds seeking to raise as much as $150 million were planned. Only one or two, including London’s Fine Art Fund, ever got off the ground. Merrill Lynch’s investment strategy report, dated July 17, helps to explain why.

“Art, gold and commodities offered the least attractive risk-reward potential, providing inferior returns while generating substantially more risk,” Merrill said. The three asset classes “may be more appropriate investments for those who have truly long-term horizons,” it said.

The study uses data on returns dating to 1969 for most assets and to 1976 for art, provided by index-maker Art Market Research, which tracks auction prices. Merrill aims to show that most investors do better if they hang on for three years or more, while many day traders and short-term investors lose money.

Modern art prices have more than doubled since 1998, and some contemporary art price indexes have trebled in 10 years, according to Art Market Research. Broader measures of the art market haven’t fared as well, and modern and contemporary art prices are being buoyed by a narrowing group of the most expensive paintings, the indexes show.

Art has done worse in some decades than in others.

In the 1970s, art had the lowest 12-month return of eight asset classes and the highest chance of losses, Merrill calculated. Gold was the best investment in that decade, outperforming stocks and bonds with less risk. Art swapped places with gold in the 1980s, doing better than stocks, bonds and real estate. In the 1990s, art was again a loser, only a little ahead of commodities and gold, which racked up 12-month losses more than 50% of the time. Standard & Poor’s 500 shares were the best investment.

Real estate and small U.S. stocks are faring best in the current decade. Art, foreign stocks and S&P’s 500 shares are the worst performers, Merrill’s charts showed.

State of the art in teambuilding

Playing in an orchestra: a valuable bonding exercise, or noisy embarrassment?

Alex Benady
Tuesday July 18, 2006
The Guardian

My last brush with collaborative music ended in ignominy when I was drummed out of the Chatsworth Road primary school triangle collective on the grounds of incompetence. Nothing in the intervening years has caused me to question the wisdom of the school triangle tsar’s decision.

But as they say in showbiz, the only thing to do after a failure is to dust yourself down and stride those boards once more. So here I am, some decades later, playing 13th viola for a 90-strong orchestra full of non-musicians who had never met until an hour before and who quite frankly make the old triangle collective sound like the London Symphony Orchestra by comparison.

We are participating in what is being billed as a “world first” in corporate training. You’ve heard of teambuilding exercises that involve raft building, making your own tactical nuclear warheads, butchering your own cow and so on. Well this is “Orchestrate”, an exercise that uses the symphony orchestra as a metaphor for the workplace and allows musical buffoons such as myself access to real instruments, a conductor and a specially composed piece of music. Our “challenge” (as we say in the corporate world) is to learn and perform this piece. From scratch. In 90 minutes.

If this sounds a little optimistic, that’s because it is meant to be. It is supposed to reflect the business idea of “stretch targets”, which are objectives deliberately set to be unreasonable, explains John Bird of Catalyst, the organisers. “The main idea is to show that what seems impossible at first can be done. We wanted something that is not threatening but is daunting.” Even he is daunted because, he admits, there is a real possibility it might not work.

So the first hour of the evening is spent drinking and networking. Meera Medana, human resources consultant at Walt Disney UK, says she is there to test-drive the event for her company. “I want to see if this could work with different groups and personality types – particularly introverted thinkers, whose biggest fear is embarrassing themselves.”

After a couple of drinks, we are deemed relaxed enough. A curtain is pulled back to reveal a large auditorium resplendent with 90 chairs and around 30 grand’s-worth of classical instruments. I opt for a violin, on the grounds that there are loads of them, so there is less potential for humiliation.

We are marched off section by section to rehearsal rooms. Our first lesson is that we are not the violin section as we had all supposed, but the viola section – the same but a bit bigger. With just an hour to learn our piece, we go straight into plucking lessons. Even this seems nightmarishly complicated. “We’ll be playing mostly on our G string,” says our tutor in an attempt to reassure us. Twelfth viola Jackie, a graphic designer, and 14th viola Chris, a barrister, find this hilarious and spend the next 10 minutes sniggering.

But by this time we are on to learning how to hold our bow, how to change notes and how to use the bow.

The piece we are learning is a repetitious thing written by Bill Lovelady. It has a strong rhythm and not much in the way of note changes. It lends itself perfectly to being broken down into monkey see, monkey do-type chunks, which of course is all we are capable of. In a way it feels like a con. “This isn’t music, it’s a simulacrum for musical cretins,” I complain to John.

“Of course it’s superficial. You can only learn so much in an hour and a half. But don’t judge just yet. You may be surprised,” he replies.

Although there are no figures available for the size of the team-building industry, it is huge. Even John admits a lot of such training is poorly thought out and purposeless. So isn’t it all a bit of a con?

“No,” says Eileen Arney, adviser on learning and development to the Institute of Personnel and Development. “Although some types of activity are cliched, these courses can be incredibly powerful if they help people to have insights into the dynamics of what’s happening when they are working in a team.”

After an hour we have the insight that we can just about do our bit, so we file off to join the rest of the orchestra. We reunite with the other strings as well as the glamour boys of the brass section and the hard men from percussion. Our conductor takes us through bit by bit so we have just 10 minutes’ rehearsal as a full orchestra.

And then we play it in its full 90 seconds of glory. Blimey. We’re elated. We may not be the world’s greatest, but we make the unmistakable sound of an orchestra playing what is unmistakably music.

“That was fantastic,” says Medana. “It needs a bit of feedback at the end to make it a useful metaphor for leadership, but I loved it. It was great being united by a piece of music, it shows you where your strengths are and how you relate to a team. I’d have no hesitation in having a lot more of our people do this.”

Her reaction sums up the feelings of everybody else in the room. So, in your face, triangle tsar. I guess your stretch targets just weren’t elastic enough.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Todd Berman wouldn’t say this of himself, but he’s certainly a man of action. Without waiting for grants or outside funding, he’s taken his online gallery, the Art Don’t Stop, to the notorious (but increasingly vital) Sixth Street.

Using a gallery space run by Randy Shaw, “journo-activist” and founder of the Tenderloin Housing Project, the Art Don’t Stop takes a collaborative approach to its art. Berman has spent the past month roaming a two- to three-block radius around the corner of Sixth and Minna. (The gallery space itself is a little strange; because it shares a door with a hotel, you can’t actually enter the gallery, you can only look at the windows.) He goes into local businesses and sketches them, then invites the business owners to the party for the show, which will be taking place today.

Berman’s larger pieces, though, are group efforts.

“I’m trying to find ways to build community,” Berman says. He sketches a scene of the street with markers, leaving blank spaces for windows, and asks people on the street to draw self-portraits that get collaged into the work. The effect is interesting; from a distance the drawing looks as if it were done by one hand, but a closer look reveals the variety of styles.

In other instances, even the paintings done by Berman are the work of many minds. In “A More Green Market Street,” for instance, Berman asked people to tell him what they thought a “more green” Market Street would look like. He incorporated their ideas — a canal instead of a paved thoroughfare, palm trees dotting the sidewalks, a rope swing. It looks sort of like the Russian River meets Hawaii.

Berman is committed to making art that doesn’t just reflect the vision of the artist — it reflects the thoughts of the community. If people buy his drawings, he gives a portion of the price to a relevant charity.

And the community appears to appreciate his efforts. When he finished sketching the inside of Donut World at Sixth and Market, he took a piece of paper out of his bag and brought it to the woman behind the glass counter. It was a letter explaining the work, giving the address of the gallery and inviting the owners to the party on today .

There was a moment of confusion as the woman took the piece of paper, but Berman persevered, showing her his drawing. She smiled, gesturing to the woman to her right. “It looks just like my doughnut shop!” Berman smiled back. It was a small, nice moment, in a string of small, nice moments in Berman’s interactions with neighborhood folks.

Party at 5:30 p.m. today with live music, art making and pizza. D.A. Arts Gallery, 135 Sixth St., S.F. www.theartdontstop.org.