By Victor Greto
In the unassuming conservation laboratory above the Winterthur museum library, a dozen eyes from the past stare out from an eternal present.
Their bodies and faces remain dramatically frozen. In one painting, several weeping figures emerge from the rich darkness of the Renaissance; the ground on which they carry away the body of Christ needed varnish removed and retouching. In an early 19th-century portrait, a woman looks away with a crimped, golden smile, the discolored varnish surrounding her in need of removal. In another, more somber-hued portrait, a governor stares out from about the time of the Civil War, parts of his face and stiff clothes bubbled and blistered from fire damage.
But the room is dominated by part of a Maxfield Parrish mural, laying flat on its back.
Quietly and steadily hunkered over the last of three murals of a once-glittering translucent work by the popular 20th-century American illustrator, Megan Companion, a University of Delaware student, meticulously applies a heated tacking iron to a dizzying melange of paint chips.
By all accounts, the Parrish mural — painted with oil mixed with dammar resin on a “thirsty canvas” in 1932 for Irenée du Pont’s Delaware home, Granogue — is a mess.
For nearly three years, it has received a lot of the attention of students, conservator and UD professor Joyce Hill Stoner, and Mark Bockrath, a paintings conservator at Winterthur Museum and UD associate adjunct professor.
Soon after Parrish completed it, the mural began to crack, Stoner said, and the painter took back the original panels and painted du Pont a newer version, which currently hangs in an organ alcove in the home.
The older, original mural was stored in his New Hampshire studio, where it remained until a Alma Gilbert-Smith, a Parrish collector and artist, bought the artist’s studio after Parrish died and donated the flaking murals to the Precision Museum in Windsor, Vt. It was there that Stoner and Gilbert-Smith found the paintings placed on top of file cabinets in the attic, and decided their restoration would be a great project for budding conservators at UD.
Parrish more often than not painted directly on a masonite panel, prepared with a white primer, Bockrath said. From there he would often project images on the panel, trace them, and meticulously paint layer upon layer of paint until he achieved stunning and often translucent colors.
In this instance, the canvas drank up the paint, “it was too absorbent,” Stoner said, cracking the painting, eventually making much of it into a jumbled jigsaw-puzzle-like mess of chips.
Companion is actually working on “consolidating” the last part of the three-sectioned mural, one three-square-inch section at a time.
Consolidation entails gathering and piecing together minuscule paint chips without overlapping their edges, many of which are upside down.
“You flip over as many as you can and try to match the shape and color,” Companion said. “If not, you put it in a jar.”
Once that is done, a gluey concoction of ethylene vinyl acetate and petroleum benzine is then dripped on to the surface, and works its way around and under the chips. After about an hour to dry, the conservator applies a tacking iron to flatten out the curled chips into a coherent scene.
After the section is consolidated, students and conservators retouch the painting, using a slightly different color that is soluble or removable, said Stoner. “We do not ever overlap the original,” she said. “Everything we do is reversible.”
The mural, which depicts mountains and trees in the background and large Greek urns in the foreground, is huge. Each part of the panel is seven feet high and four feet wide. On average, it takes between three to four hours to consolidate a 3-square-inch section.
“These are great projects for students to work on,” Stoner said. “If they like it, they’ll stay in it. If not, they’ll go away.”
It’s a test of patience, craft and fortitude said Companion and Matt Cushman, who will be moving on to graduate school.
Cushman, a former chemistry major, also is a spatial thinker, he said, so he loves consolidating more then retouching. “I look at all the little chips, start memorizing the contours of chips and see little openings, and fit them together,” he said. “It’s like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle.”
“It’s a cool thing,” said Kesha Beavers, a newly transferred student into the program. “You spend your entire day to get a little bit done. But it gets quicker as you gain experience.”
The results are amazing, Companion said. “To see the finished product, which went from chips everywhere to this,” she said, pointing to finished middle panel, which currently is standing upright in the middle of the workshop.