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What are the things that are most damaging to art?
One of the things that we see a lot – because we do work for the insurance sector, so we see a lot of very severe damage – is seeing the effects that water has on artworks. So, you know, you have kind of a broad range of, you know, very high humidity all the way through to kind of full flooding and submersion, and the kind of varying stages of what it can do to not just paintings, but, you know, artworks on paper, pieces of furniture and, like, how kind of changed an artwork can be from kind of a very quick exposure to water. So, for instance, an issue that we see a lot with paintings is, typically kind of 20th-century paintings that have a fairly modern paint film because of a lot of the additives that they would use in paints that go in kind of the tubes that we know today, they’re quite responsive to moisture. So, even very high humidity can make certain elements of the paint and varnish appear different and they go kind of white and hazy. So, you might not have even seen anything happen to your artwork and then suddenly it’s cloudy. It’s like kind of bloomed, we would call it, and you can’t understand what’s going on. And it’s such a kind of a minor environmental thing, but it has such a big impact. I think it’s quite interesting.
And have you ever received a painting where you thought, actually, this is beyond saving?
Ooh, we’ve definitely… I don’t think we’ve ever had anything that we, like, just couldn’t do anything for. Typically, because it’s quite a, like, labour-intensive profession, you know, like, treatments take a long time, it’s like many, many hours of work, we typically have the situation where, you know, the cost is prohibitive for clients. Which is a real shame because, you know, we, you know, could go to a certain level with stabilizing something or restoring it and making it kind of either safe to handle or, you know, ready for display. But sometimes the kind of economic factors mean that it’s not kind of doable, which is sad but understandable.