Jean Charlot Fresco Conservation - Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

October 6

Hi, this is Craig Crawford. I’m doing the conservation work on Jean Charlot. It is October 6th, and I just wanted to talk about what we did today. We surface cleaned the paintings with a dry cleaning method and not very much dirt came off, although there were mud dauber nests and up in this corner, and just cobwebs and little accretions on the surface, and stuff that we took off. Then we coated the paintings with a very dilute solution of Acryloid B-72, which is a stable synthetic resin. That was done to kind of saturate some of the colors, and to consolidate any friable plaster material, and try to hold that together a little better. We did not want that to sit on the surface, so most of it absorbed below the surface. And then we’ve gone in and filled some of the losses, as you can see, we’re still working on some of the filling. We did that with the tone vinyl film material, and then we’ll go back over that with the Acryloid B-72. 

So we’re in the process of kind of completing that, and starting to get a feel for the in-painting. You can see here where some of the painting has been done in these areas of abrasions, and loss. Mostly, you know, that’s what we’re focusing on first. You can see Maho is over here, in-painting just little areas of abrasions and damage. And you can see here some of the graffiti we filled as well, to try to get the surface smooth again, relatively smooth again compared to what it was before. So that’s where we’re at and we will continue tomorrow.

October 8

It’s Thursday, October 8th of the conservation project on the Jean Charlot paintings, and today we just continued in-painting the paintings, mostly just closing in areas. As you can remember, in this area, there was a lot of graffiti visible, and now it’s pretty much disappeared. Tomorrow I’ll be working on the second half, top half of this area. 

And on this one [turning from Inspiration to Knowledge] we’re kind of flushing in some of the areas that were completely missing, and trying to to get the form into those areas where nothing was present except the scoring in the plaster, and you can see I’ve also filled some more small little indentations and gouges that were distracting, so I’ll be cleaning those fills tomorrow, and just continuing to in-paint. So that’s pretty much where we’re at today, and I feel like it was pretty productive.

October 10

Okay, it’s October 10th, and we are just updating the progress on the Charlot murals. Today we just kept tightening up some of the in-painting, and trying to determine the form, some of the forms in the fabric draped around the legs in this figure [Knowledge]. We’ll be working on that more tomorrow, trying to get in some shadows and a little more three-dimensional quality, and sort of figuring out what details are in the book that we can pull out or sort of hint at, that were original to the piece. So, still tightening up things.

And here [Inspiration] we’ve also been doing the same, and Maho has mostly been getting in some of the values a little closer to how they were originally, particularly along the bottom and top and some around the edges. So this one’s getting pretty close to being complete. We’re just going to have some final things to do, but it’s getting pretty close, and so we’ll just keep working on them.

October 11

It’s October 11th, and just an update on the Jean Charlot paintings. Today we just worked on this side [Knowledge], mostly trying to even out the fabric around the legs and try to get a little more form to it. Then we worked on the book, trying to get some of the pages that were slightly visible, but hints of that, so we just wanted to make sure they were more visible on the pages. We also did a little more work in the background, and still working on the arm here, and just other little things on this one. This was the only one we focused on today.

October 13

Okay, this is October 13th on the murals, and what we did this morning was just tighten up some areas, particularly down here in the lower corner. Some of this darker area, we wanted to make it more consistent with some of the original down there, and we evened out some of the painting in here. And then on this side [Inspiration], we worked some in this corner, evening out a little bit of the in-painting, and some in this section as well. Then the murals were sprayed with a very dilute UVS matte varnish, very dilute with mineral spirits, and just misted with it to kind of saturate some of the in-painting. And that’s what was done today on the 13th.