All posts by namitajaspal
A look at the BEVA 371 film lining
Brittle canvas with Bad repairs and backing (part 1)
This pair of oil on canvas paintings has brittle canvas that had been repaired in a rush. Lets look into the problems they had, in the following pictures: These torn canvases were repaired with patches of canvas from back, which were in turn stuck to a wooden board backing. At one place in one of…
Planning the next learning activity
We, at Heritage Preservation Atelier invite all those who are interested in learning more about Paper conservation to meet and plan our next practical workshop on paper conservation along with theoretic lessons. Here is what we propose as an initiative. You are all welcome to add/advise/suggest further. Duration : 2 days (Dates in the month…
Localized flattening treatment of a drawing
Trying to save heritage
Humidification to relax stiff old documents
Humidity relaxes the paper stiffness. This relaxation is important for flattening paper that is out of shape because of folds creases etc. But, there are some questions and doubts about humidifying in the right way: How to humidify without causing a shocking reaction to the paper which has been in dry environment for ages? What…
Verdigris in paintings on paper
Copper green or verdigris was commonly used in the illustrations of the handwritten manuscripts and miniature paintings on paper. This colour has a beautiful warm effect, but tends to destroy the paper very fast, specially in humid environment. We can see in the following pictures, how the paper is almost burnt exactly in the area…
Internship Experience – June/July 2017 post 3
Internship is a pathway from studentship to professionalism. This month’s archival conservation internship started around mid June. After the first day of simple discussion and brain-storming session, the new team learned the basics of archival conservation while working on the actual old maps starting from simpler procedures to more responsible ones. Students are slowly turning…
Frescoes vs Tempera
When we talk about wall paintings or mural paintings, most of us call them ‘frescoes’. This might not be technically correct for all the murals.Technically, if the painting is created ( or we can say that the colours are applied) on a lime plaster which is still wet, the painting is called fresco (Italian word…
Internship Experience – June post 1
Interns: Keerat, Chetna, Lovely, Subhashini and Manit 24 JUNE 2017 We are a group of youngsters (Chetna, Subhashini and Lovely) pursuing Masters in Conservation and Archaeology .We have come to beautiful cool city of Chandigarh to gain practical experience in Paper/Archival Conservation. We will be working on blueprints for next few days. Keerat and Manit…
Humidity Chamber
Blue-prints and White-prints or blue-lines
June 2017These days we are working on a few blue-prints and blue-lines in our lab. Before starting the work, we tried to discuss the material and technique used in making them. This write-up is the summary of our discussion on the topic. Both these processes (blue prints and blue lines/white prints) use different light sensitive…
Anoxia for Museum collections
Anoxic treatment system isolates the objects to be preserved into anoxic (without oxygen or oxygen deprived) micro environments, protects them from insects, aerobic biological threats and dust. Over the past decade many museums have increased their use of inert gases to eliminate insects from infested objects. The reasons are clear, practical experience has shown that conventional fumigants can…
An example of archival conservation
Art conservation of Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji (The Golden Temple), Amritsar, India
Namita Jaspal Heritage Preservation Atelier, Chandigarh, India namitajaspal72@gmail.com; heritage.atelier@gmail.com http://www.heritagepreservationatelier.com Introduction When we are trusted upon the responsibility of doing art conservation services for an active religious site, we tend to get a mixed feeling of gratitude and anxiousness. Gratitude is generally because of the ingrained faith we might have for the sacred site and…
Old Photographs
We started our discussion regarding old photographs (https://heritagepreservationatelier.com/2017/05/20/historic-photographs/https://heritagepreservationatelier.com/2017/05/20/historic-photographs/) with an example of a silver albumin print. In this blog, we’ll see some other examples from the same collection,but all different techniques of photo-prints. 2014 and 2015 were a bit busy years and hence i could not record all the work that we did. We did…
Historic Photographs
Photography has been a great invention around first half of nineteenth century. It created possibilities of experimentation for the creative minds interested in making real images on paper. Following is a picture of a badly restored and mounted photograph created by one of the older techniques. We tried to analyze the technique by which it…
Gild playing peek-a-boo
We had already completed damage mapping at Sri Darbar Saheb Ji, in the months of October and November 2013, but gilding started playing peek-a-boo once test patches of cleaning were started later in November and December. There were many places where gilding was uncovered not just beneath the thick grime layers, but also under thick…
December 2013
Conservation and personal scene at Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji (My personal dairy of professional and personal scenario in December of 2013) December 2013 was strange, i had committed to start actual on-site work at Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji and at home my father-in-law suffered second paralytic attack (he could not survive it after 27th December),…
Moments from brain-storming session during Fresco Conservation Workshop
Discussions a day before site visit and practical experience,
Instructions of Gurus
Working on Hukumnamas (2015)
Extent of damage in wall paintings (Darbar Saheb Ji)
Since the paintings were created by Bhai Atma Singh directly over the paintings done earlier by Bhai Gyan Singh, the grip or binding to the ground (earlier painting was serving like ground layer) was minimal and there was huge amount of flaking. The paintings of Bhai Atma Singh were in turn over painted by different…
Wall paintings(at Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji), as we found them before starting our work
Initially it took some three to five trips to Sri Amritsar, all by myself as a conservation expert and with managers of Sri Harmandar Sheb Ji to understand the extent of damage to the wall paintings and gold plates. Following pictures were taken by me during these earlier trips somewhere in the mid of 2013.…
First Team at Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji
Walls of the first floor at Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji
Golden Temple or Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji is a sacred site visited by thousands of people every day, but not many go to the first floor. Even among those who go to first floor, not many take the parikrama at the first floor. Following picture is an incomplete model of the first floor parikrama. The…
Conservation lab loves to elaborate even an extremely simple job of fixing a broken ceramic
(Just that this piece of ceramic is unique and historically important.) Small jobs like cleaning are actually meditative and provide, much needed peace, focus and purpose. Conservation lab tends to glamorize the small jobs too, with a pinch of specific knowledge and the confidence of the practical application of the knowledge of the material and…
Conservation lab loves to elaborate even an extremely simple job of fixing a broken ceramic
(Just that this piece of ceramic is unique and historically important.) Small jobs like cleaning are actually meditative and provide, much needed peace, focus and purpose. Conservation lab tends to glamorize the small jobs too, with a pinch of specific knowledge and the confidence of the practical application of the knowledge of the material and…
Solvent gel cleaning, consolidation and in-painting
…continued from the previous post A Case study of an oil on canvas painting It was important to remove the old varnish from this painting because, it was very thickly applied almost every other year of its lifetime and had darkened to an extent that the actual colors of the painting were not visible. For…
A Case study of an oil on canvas painting
A painting that came to our lab some five springs back makes a very good study for the students who have just started learning the practice of conservation. It was a portrait of great-grandfather of Maharaja of Kapurthala. Ignorance of the staff responsible for the upkeep of the palace had led to multiple problems. Not…
Workshop April 2017
The April 2017 workshop was on Preventive and Curative conservation practices in museums and archives. It was a very enriching experience for both the participants and the organizers. This workshop was organized by the joint efforts of State Museum and Heritage Preservation Atelier. Since the museum is facing a lot of problems mainly because of…
Research work on paper and microbes infecting paper
This is an attempt to share the research work we did some two decades back on paper and microbes infecting paper. Following pictures are just glimpses of the complete research work. A shorter version of the research work (four pages) was published later around 2001, which is also shared here.
Case study of a silver gilded artifact
A beautiful piece of silver gilded artifact depicting a war scene came to our lab in 2007. It was previously wrongly restored by applying a thick layer of silver acrylic colour to hide the faults. Our first step was to remove the silver paint layer. This took a lot of time and efforts. Once the…
One of the cleaning treatments of an oil on canvas painting: step by step approach
Cleaning seems a simple process and i have seen people in charge of historically important collections doing disastrous actions leading to irreversible damage of important art or history objects. It might apparently be a simple cleaning job, but it is the most important step that needs to be understood in all possible analytical and scientific…
Conservation of Archival Material
Conservation of archival material is a specialized field of work. We need to understand the structure and chemistry of paper, ink, binders, adhesives etc. This video is actually making a tough job seem quite easy. Whenever we need to separate two surfaces/layers, we need to understand many things about those two surfaces. One of the…
Beginning of a story writing job
Namita “Sometimes professions are created and offered to you as a gift!” I never planned to be a conservator (of cultural property). I was just a curious kid who wanted to know about life, how living bodies work, how the whole world works?! I had very good artistic skills too. Was doing B.Sc and just…
Treatment of an oil painting on canvas
The treatment process we are showing in this video was recorded in 2013, but because of a very tight schedule over the last few years i could not upload it. I just found this old video while searching for some pictures of a different project. Hope you enjoy the video and i am sure there…
Fresco Conservation Workshop
Learning is fun at Heritage Preservation Atelier. It was free of cost too this time, with a two day site trip, cool stay at a beautiful British period guest house. Physical chemistry and inorganic chemistry met history and architecture in the discussions and brain storming sessions on-site as well as in the cozy class room.…
Securing the flaking off pieces
There are many methods used to secure the falling of pieces right in the beginning , before we start with other treatment procedures of conservation. These methods are extremely helpful as they allow the conservators work with more confidence while removing the surface accumulations that are damaging as well as obscuring the art work and…
Gilding
Gold and Silver gilding techniques have evolved over the centuries. We love to apply gold and silver on surfaces like, wall plaster, stone, wood, metal, paper and textile. During my visit to the Calico Museum, i was amazed to see the gold work on textiles in so many different ways. In my years of experience…
Ulysses gets rid of rust before restoration
Rust was all we could see on the day we first saw Ulysses by Sri Satish Gujral and rust was what we had to struggle with, for nearly a month! In spite of all the struggle and initial confusion about whats beneath the rust, the whole process of treating Ulysses was educating and a wonderful…
Temple coming out alive
The temple i am discussing these days is unique in many ways. One major point of interest is its paintings that have such a diversity. Mythological stories and characters (apart from the Gods also), Kings, Sikh guards, British warriors, Train, …all in adjacent walls or even same wall.. Can someone throw light on this war…
Wall painting conservation
Life is beautiful and hard at the same time. This temple whose walls stood the ravages of time, survived in the middle of a jungle to tell the story of its time. How artistic, full of character and co-existing humans of its time were. What happened to the beauty? What happened to the harmony? When…
Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji
Camera fails to capture what eyes see here….. The place i am sitting right now is the place where our Gurus used to meditate.It is the first floor of Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji. It is truly meditative. One tends to forget the worldly chaos. The paintings that we see here were executed in mid twentieth…
Heritage Conservation, Youth and Employment
Conservation/restoration Challenge: Graffiti
Should a fresco painting like this be left as such with the graffiti overpowering the original beauty of the art work, or should it be treated meticulously subduing the damage bringing out the original beauty of the painting? We find so many historical sites in India where such heartless damage is done by some irresponsible…
Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji
Namita Jaspal Wall paintings: Tough decision making Beautiful wall paintings of sacred Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji were flaking off and crumbling when a professional advice was at last sought in 2013. Till 2013, these paintings were retouched or repaired by random staff or artists. They would just touch up the white areas left by flaked…
Sikh Art- Sri Harmandar Saheb Ji
Sikh art developed around middle of nineteenth century. It has borrowed extensively from Hindu and Muslim traditions and art forms but depicted them in their own way and in a new setting. Not much research has been done on this highly developed form of art which has its own class. I know of very few…
Vice Regal Dining Car, Restoration Project and a scene from ‘Ki and Ka’
Earning sheer Joy out of work!!
Vice Regal Dining Conservation
The vice regal dinning car built by Ajmer workshops of the BB & CIR (Bombay, Baroda and central India railway) in the year 1889 is juxtaposing the luxurious special rail carriage used by the Viceroy of India then during his travel around the country. This wooden bodied dinning car was part of a five-car Vice…