Art conservators employ
Patience and a
delicate touch
Priceless artworks are
By Tim Ryan
painstakingly preserved for
future generations
Star-BulletinOAKLAND, Calif. -- A stone's throw from a busy elevated freeway is a two-story brick building with no name. It's the last place you'd expect to find priceless works of art. But it's here that Ephraim "Eddie" Jose repairs millions of dollars worth of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art, much of it from the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
The traffic drone outside Jose's studio disappears inside, where recorded harp music whispers through the spacious, impeccably clean workplace.
On large tables, centuries-old Japanese screens and scroll paintings are spread out. Some are being analyzed for damage; others have been worked on for more than a year.
One table holds a piece of an 18th century hand scroll that depicts a street scene. The complete scroll is worth about $250,000, Jose says, although academy officials decline to discuss valuations for security reasons.
"This is a quality painting, a beautifully done work," Jose says. "If you look closely you can see small tears. My job is to make it right."
Conserving rare art is what Jose wanted to do since he was a child growing up in Manila. He's part of a small group of art conservators in the United States, and if the number of pieces waiting to be repaired in his studio is an indication, Jose may be one of the best.
The Honolulu Academy of Arts uses Jose almost exclusively for its Japanese painting collection, considered one of the finest in the United States, said Julia White, the Academy's curator of Asian art since 1996.
"Very few people are qualified to do this kind of work," White said. "And if we can't afford to have the best do it, then we don't have it done until we can."
Historic artifacts, documents, structures, and other unique objects of past and present cultures survive today through care, maintenance, or "simply good fortune," White said. But many conditions, natural and human-influenced, cause aging and deterioration, including light, extremes of humidity and temperature, pests, pollutants, and accidental damage, she said.
"They all hasten the breakdown of artifact materials," Jose adds. "There's no getting around it."Before this century, Jose said, restorations were performed by "restorers" who were either self-taught or learned the trade from other restorers. But their focus was "the appearance" of the restoration work, rather than the soundness or long-term benefit of their procedures, he said.
Today, conservation has developed into a multidisciplinary profession in which modern scientific methods augment craft traditions, said Susan Sayre Batton, art conservator and consultant, of Los Angeles. Batton does conservator work for the Academy, principally on its Japanese print collection.
"Conservation is highly specialized but demands a broad knowledge of several subjects like art history, studio art, science and materials technology," she said.
Batton worked for about a year on many of the 200 Japanese wood-block prints from the James A. Michener Collection currently on loan to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. (The Hokusai and Hiroshige exhibition will open in the Academy's Fountain Court gallery in March.)
Many museums and institutions have their own conservation departments. Other institutions, like the Honolulu Academy of Arts, contract some or all of their conservation work to private individuals or regional conservation laboratories.
There's a big difference between "restoration" and "conservation," Batton said.
Restoration refers to the reconstruction of the aesthetic appearance of an object, she said. Although restoration can be one aspect of conservation, the latter encompasses much more. Conservation involves examination, scientific analysis, and research to determine original structure, materials and extent of loss. Conservation also encompasses structural and environmental treatment to retard future deterioration.
"We're concerned with a number of factors in preserving an object, including determining it's structural stability, counteracting chemical and physical deterioration, and performing conservation treatment based on an evaluation of the aesthetic, historic and scientific characteristics of the object," Jose added.
In practice, the work is tedious and requires an lots of patience.
"The worst that can happen is the conservator makes a hole in a piece of art that didn't exist before," Jose said. "Then you have changed the look of the painting. Very bad."
On the hand scroll Jose is repairing for the academy, he first removes the fabric backing the paper to "clean up" the painting. The paper is very thin and can easily tear.
He moistens the scroll's back side just enough over a period of no more than five days so that the paste "releases" the fabric without tearing or dissolving the artwork. The trick is knowing how much moisture is enough, Jose said. "You can only soak a painting so long because when it's a hundred years old paper is very fragile."
While some backings can be soaked off, others can only be removed with a special brush requiring thousands of gentle strokes.
The scroll is small, requiring just one worker. A larger piece, like the academy's priceless Amida Raigo, (roughly "The Descent of Buddha"), requires several workers.
It's not unusual for a conservator to do only a partial repair. "We may do as little as possible just to get the image back up to a certain point because we don't want to alter the images," White said.
Working on such difficult pieces ensures "I can go to heaven when I die," said Jose, who learned art conservation in Japan where he studied and apprenticed for a decade. He opened his Bay area business in 1990.
Simple conservation or restoration costs about $1,000, Jose said. Difficult repairs, like those performed on the Buddha, cost $5,000-$30,000, White said.
