Department of Art History and Art Conservation

A Passion for Paint

MLR7 — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:17:44 +0000

When she decided to pursue a career in art conservation, Patricia Smithen had no idea that it would one day mean overseeing a room full of butterflies at the esteemed Tate Modern contemporary art gallery. She also had no idea that she would one day find herself teaching in the very department where she had received her own training 25 years earlier.

Setting the stage for the artistic repatriation of Indigenous music

moonr — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 19:29:45 +0000

In what may be a classical music first, the Canadian Opera Company (COC) and the National Arts Centre (NAC) are co-commissioning new music to replace part of a copyrighted musical work – the opera Louis Riel – to redress the misappropriation of a Nisga’a First Nations song.

Patricia Smithen: Art conservation

moonr — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:28:22 +0000

When she decided to pursue a career in art conservation, Patricia Smithen had no idea that it would one day mean overseeing the care and feeding of a room full of butterflies at the Tate Modern, one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary art galleries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5byH0lSOMw

Collateral research

kvd1 — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 19:14:45 +0000

Joan Schwartz

A walk through the MET is an exercise in experiential learning, no matter what one’s area of interest. Every visit to New York, I make my pilgrimage to the great 19th century painting Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year, I strode past the large-scale medieval sculptures, altarpieces, tapestries, and furniture on my way to the Robert Lehman Collection, but then Ack! the Collection was temporarily closed! Disheartened, I turned around and started back through the Medieval Gallery when I was struck by this sculpture in raking light.

Location of photograph:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA

Submission Year:

2016-17

Christ in Majesty, Hereford Choir Screen, George Gilbert Scott 1862

kvd1 — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 19:11:39 +0000

Matthew Reeve

I was recently invited to participate in a collaborative project with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Paul Mellon Centre to publish the first account of the great screen by Scott and Skidmore (now in the V&A). After presenting our preliminary work in summer 2016, a handful of experts were allowed unprecedented access to the screen. Standing precariously on a chair with one leg and leaning on my colleague from Berkeley, this photo of the central Christ in Majesty was a lucky shot captured with my iPhone.

Location of photograph:

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

Submission Year:

2016-17

Medical history, lost and found

kvd1 — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 15:29:41 +0000

Allison Morehead

While conducting research for an exhibition on Edvard Munch and medicine, I was rummaging around in boxes recently transferred from the state hospital (Rikshospitalet) to the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (Teknisk Museum) when I came across this collection of historical surgical instruments. The tags indicate that they were part of a teaching collection, but the objects appear to have been hastily boxed up and are now detached from their inventory. A poetic jumble of objects, they speak of a medical past that is in danger of being lost as medical collections are consolidated, dispersed, and even destroyed.

Location of photograph:

Oslo, Norway

Submission Year:

2017-18

Still-life painting alight with UV-radiation

kvd1 — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 22:51:22 +0000

Courtney Books

Art conservation uses Ultra-violet lighting in a similar way that a detective uses a black light to inspect a crime scene. Awash with the electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light in the form of wavelengths, the painting's secrets are revealed; artist materials fluoresce distinct colours in the visible spectrum depending on the age and type of material present. A conservator is able to approximate the age of a painting (e.g. the milky green-yellow glow of varnish intensifies with time) and discern what is original, artist applied material versus those subsequently added to the painting, such as a restorer or conservator's touch.

Location of photograph:

Madrid, Spain

Submission Year:

2017-18

Norman Vorano: Queen's National Scholar in Indigenous Art

moonr — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 23:03:53 +0000

Queen's National Scholar in Indigenous Art, Norman Vorano, was named one of five Trudeau Fellowship recipients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9r15x5r3s

Unspooling Vermeer

stratg — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 20:17:01 +0000

Stephanie Dickey

Wherever I go, I look for evidence of how the historical art I study impacts visual culture today. In “After Vermeer 2,” an installation from 2006 by New York artist Devorah Sperber, 5024 spools of thread strung on steel chains recreate, upside down, the famous “Girl with a Pearl Earring” painted by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer around 1665. My photo captures the viewer’s experience of looking through a glass sphere in which the image rights itself. Vermeer, whose paintings explored both optics and female experience, would surely have appreciated this perceptive transformation of his art.

Location of photograph:

Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, USA

Prize name:

Winner, Art in Action

Submission Year:

2017-18

Santa Fina

stratg — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 19:47:24 +0000

Una D’Elia

Pietro Torrigiani, a competitor of Michelangelo, carved this bust of a saint out of marble and then painted it so that blood seems to run in this determined young girl's veins. This lively piece, made over five hundred years ago, is an example of the kind of naturalistic sculptures that have been little studied, as most scholars focus on monochrome "high art" statuary. The sculptures I am studying were not confined to museums, but were a part of the social lives of Italian men and women, who talked to, touched, kissed, worshipped, attacked, and dressed sometimes uncannily realistic coloured sculptures.

Location of photograph:

Musei Civici, San Gimignano, Italy

Prize name:

Second prize

Submission Year:

2015-16

Magdalene

stratg — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 20:44:50 +0000

Una D’Elia

For over 550 years, the passionate Magdalene has been running with her veil streaming behind, screaming, to the body of Jesus, dead on the ground. This life-size statue, originally painted to mimic flesh and clothes, pushes the limits of the medium, terracotta. Renaissance men and women could walk among Niccolo dell’Arca’s sculptures, feeling as if they were present at this terrible moment in Christian history. Dr. Una D’Elia’s research focuses on such living sculptures, stories of statues coming to life, and people touching, dressing, attacking, and generally treating sculptures as if they were alive.

Location of photograph:

Church of Santa Maria della Vita, Bologna

Prize name:

Shortlisted image

Submission Year:

2016-17

Tulugak on the Crucifix

stratg — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 20:28:11 +0000

Norman Vorano

Dr. Norman Vorano was conducting historical research with Inuit elders in Nunavut in April and May of 2016. One woman recounted the loss of cultural traditions as a result of the changes that happened during the twentieth century, particularly from residential schools, the missionaries, and the waves of southerners who flooded into the Arctic after the Second World War. After they broke for lunch, Vorano stepped outside. The white sky was indistinguishable from the ground. He walked past a towering crucifix erected behind the Catholic Church, on an imposing hill overlooking the community. A raven flew down from the ethereal sky, perched on the Crucifix, and began vocalizing. For Western culture, the raven is a harbinger of death. For Inuit culture, tulugak – raven – is a tricky fellow that symbolizes creation.

Location of photograph:

Pond Inlet, Nunavut

Prize name:

First prize

Submission Year:

2016-17

The Story of Paint

vandusen — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 20:34:22 +0000

Professor Patricia Smithen is an art conservator and Queen’s alumna who teaches in the Master of Art Conservation program at Queen’s. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, she worked as a paintings conservator at the Canadian Conservation Institute, as a private practitioner in Montreal and at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and as the Conservator of Modern and Contemporary Paintings at the Tate Conservation Department. In this episode, Prof. Smithen describes what the “science” is behind art conservation, as well as the study of paint itself.