which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2019-11-20 09:52 pm
which_chick) wrote2019-11-20 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
How's that Home Improvement thing going?
It's still going, but I don't have a ton of amazing things to report.
I looked into fixing the cracking oil painting, in which process I discovered I am amusing even when I don't intend to be amusing.
I had to look into it because I know fuck-all about painting conservation. The SUM TOTAL of my Fancy Art Conservation Knowledge comes from YouTube Painting Conservation videos and it is as follows:
1. You Need To Hire A Professional
2. If You Try To Fix It Yourself You Will Fuck It Up More Expensively. Just Don't.
I don't even know what the shit it COSTS to have a painting conserved. I know ballpark for what lots of things cost, but painting conservation is, in short, a Princess Jasmine / Aladdin duet. (A Whole New World if you're not up on your Disney Princess songs.)
So, I googled for a Painting Conservation Place near me. There's one in Carlisle, PA. Mom lives in Harrisburg, Brother-the-Younger lives in York, both of which may be fairly regarded as Carlisle-adjacent locations. I read the website. I sent the info address an email. Here is the email I sent:
I own a 28"x38" painting (I think it's oil. I don't know squat about art. It is not a watercolor. I suspect it's an oil. It could be a very blobby acrylic, I guess.) on canvas that dates from the mid-1960's.
It is not a famous painting (by a guy named Ertman, a professor of art in Ohio) but I am quite fond of it. The paint is cracking in spots. I would like it to not-be-cracking and I definitely don't want the paint to fall off of it. My family has owned the painting since it was new and nothing has been done to it since we bought it except hanging it on the wall.
Attached please find a picture of the painting and two detail pictures of typical cracked areas, which are mostly in the darker pigments, not the yellow bits. At a guess I'd say roughly half of the painting surface shows some cracks. I've included a tape measure in the detail shots so that you have some idea of the scale of the issue.
I have about two thousand dollars set aside for this project.
Is this a thing that can be fixed within my budget? If it can't be completely fixed, can it just be stabilized within this budget? Is there, in short, anything you can do for my painting that would be useful for two grand, or does conservation of paintings cost buckets more than that?
I have no idea, not being the sort of person who has paintings conserved all the time. Right now, I need a ballpark "Yeah, there's stuff we can do" or "LOL Nope, that won't even get you in the door."
Please advise.
The painting guy emailed me back and allowed as how I should call. So I called. He seems legit and kind of went over his creds as if I hadn't carefully perused the website afore deciding on him. I listened politely to all of that but I was grouting tile at the time because I was at work. Anyway, upshot of the call was that 2K is "in the ballpark" for what it'll cost to fix the painting. He needs to see it in person and they generate written estimates and get half down before proceeding with work, which is consistent with MANY OTHER CONTRACTORS like, for example, my roofing guy. This is not a special or weird way of doing contract work. Painting Conservation Guy ALSO said that I'd sent him the funniest and most charming email he'd gotten in ages. He said he LOL'd.
I was not going for LOL. I was going for "Here is my problem, here is how much money I have, can anything useful be done?"
According to my friend Trysta, my emails are 100% amusing even when I am not particularly going for amusing. *sigh* I don't know what to do with that information. When I'm not Going For Amusing, it feels a lot like folks are out there Laughing At which, damn it, is not OK. (If I'm Going For Amusing, then it's Laughing With, which is OK.)
But it's not something I can fix and it brings joy to the little black hearts of those I email and it doesn't actually hurt me unless I let it. I am working on not letting it bother me, to which end I have spilled a lot of electrons across your screen. It's a process...
I worked on my squares for the bathroom afghan. I now have 12 squares. It'll be a while on this, but I am working on it.
I got some raw sausage from the horse people, who recently butchered a fairly large pig. I wasn't intending on the sausage, but I was there dropping off apples for Lala and her mom came out the house en route to the adjacent chicken coop all "You want any pig meat?" and so I go in to find half a pig (approximately) laid out on the kitchen table in assorted large plastic bags (chops, ribs, sausage, etc. It's not in serving-size packages. It's pretty much loose meat in large plastic bags because that's how it comes back from the guy who cuts up the pig.) and so I took about 5 lbs of sausage (salt and pepper only) and three pork chops.
The sausage was for research purposes. The people who cut up the pig are not good at hot sausage but yet the horse people and me, we LIKE hot sausage, done right. We prefer it to other sausage. Last time they did a pig, they ordered the hot sausage but it was inferior hot sausage that nobody really liked, a freaking pig's worth of it. Which, yes, we ate. Nobody's throwing away an entire pig of sausage even though it's not good. However, this year they ordered "salt and pepper only" sausage because nobody wants to slog through a whole pig of crappy hot sausage again.
Lala: "I don't understand why their hot sausage is shit. How hard can it be?"
Me: "It can't be THAT hard*. If we make small batches, we can try different recipes to find something we like. And if we're stuck with a whole pig worth of sausage that is crappy, at least it will be crappy in different ways."
Lala: "Fine. Five lbs. at a time seems reasonable."
And so I made five pounds of hot sausage this evening by way of Internet Recipe #1.
*It may well be THAT hard. I will provide an update after the weekend.
I looked into fixing the cracking oil painting, in which process I discovered I am amusing even when I don't intend to be amusing.
I had to look into it because I know fuck-all about painting conservation. The SUM TOTAL of my Fancy Art Conservation Knowledge comes from YouTube Painting Conservation videos and it is as follows:
1. You Need To Hire A Professional
2. If You Try To Fix It Yourself You Will Fuck It Up More Expensively. Just Don't.
I don't even know what the shit it COSTS to have a painting conserved. I know ballpark for what lots of things cost, but painting conservation is, in short, a Princess Jasmine / Aladdin duet. (A Whole New World if you're not up on your Disney Princess songs.)
So, I googled for a Painting Conservation Place near me. There's one in Carlisle, PA. Mom lives in Harrisburg, Brother-the-Younger lives in York, both of which may be fairly regarded as Carlisle-adjacent locations. I read the website. I sent the info address an email. Here is the email I sent:
I own a 28"x38" painting (I think it's oil. I don't know squat about art. It is not a watercolor. I suspect it's an oil. It could be a very blobby acrylic, I guess.) on canvas that dates from the mid-1960's.
It is not a famous painting (by a guy named Ertman, a professor of art in Ohio) but I am quite fond of it. The paint is cracking in spots. I would like it to not-be-cracking and I definitely don't want the paint to fall off of it. My family has owned the painting since it was new and nothing has been done to it since we bought it except hanging it on the wall.
Attached please find a picture of the painting and two detail pictures of typical cracked areas, which are mostly in the darker pigments, not the yellow bits. At a guess I'd say roughly half of the painting surface shows some cracks. I've included a tape measure in the detail shots so that you have some idea of the scale of the issue.
I have about two thousand dollars set aside for this project.
Is this a thing that can be fixed within my budget? If it can't be completely fixed, can it just be stabilized within this budget? Is there, in short, anything you can do for my painting that would be useful for two grand, or does conservation of paintings cost buckets more than that?
I have no idea, not being the sort of person who has paintings conserved all the time. Right now, I need a ballpark "Yeah, there's stuff we can do" or "LOL Nope, that won't even get you in the door."
Please advise.
The painting guy emailed me back and allowed as how I should call. So I called. He seems legit and kind of went over his creds as if I hadn't carefully perused the website afore deciding on him. I listened politely to all of that but I was grouting tile at the time because I was at work. Anyway, upshot of the call was that 2K is "in the ballpark" for what it'll cost to fix the painting. He needs to see it in person and they generate written estimates and get half down before proceeding with work, which is consistent with MANY OTHER CONTRACTORS like, for example, my roofing guy. This is not a special or weird way of doing contract work. Painting Conservation Guy ALSO said that I'd sent him the funniest and most charming email he'd gotten in ages. He said he LOL'd.
I was not going for LOL. I was going for "Here is my problem, here is how much money I have, can anything useful be done?"
According to my friend Trysta, my emails are 100% amusing even when I am not particularly going for amusing. *sigh* I don't know what to do with that information. When I'm not Going For Amusing, it feels a lot like folks are out there Laughing At which, damn it, is not OK. (If I'm Going For Amusing, then it's Laughing With, which is OK.)
But it's not something I can fix and it brings joy to the little black hearts of those I email and it doesn't actually hurt me unless I let it. I am working on not letting it bother me, to which end I have spilled a lot of electrons across your screen. It's a process...
I worked on my squares for the bathroom afghan. I now have 12 squares. It'll be a while on this, but I am working on it.
I got some raw sausage from the horse people, who recently butchered a fairly large pig. I wasn't intending on the sausage, but I was there dropping off apples for Lala and her mom came out the house en route to the adjacent chicken coop all "You want any pig meat?" and so I go in to find half a pig (approximately) laid out on the kitchen table in assorted large plastic bags (chops, ribs, sausage, etc. It's not in serving-size packages. It's pretty much loose meat in large plastic bags because that's how it comes back from the guy who cuts up the pig.) and so I took about 5 lbs of sausage (salt and pepper only) and three pork chops.
The sausage was for research purposes. The people who cut up the pig are not good at hot sausage but yet the horse people and me, we LIKE hot sausage, done right. We prefer it to other sausage. Last time they did a pig, they ordered the hot sausage but it was inferior hot sausage that nobody really liked, a freaking pig's worth of it. Which, yes, we ate. Nobody's throwing away an entire pig of sausage even though it's not good. However, this year they ordered "salt and pepper only" sausage because nobody wants to slog through a whole pig of crappy hot sausage again.
Lala: "I don't understand why their hot sausage is shit. How hard can it be?"
Me: "It can't be THAT hard*. If we make small batches, we can try different recipes to find something we like. And if we're stuck with a whole pig worth of sausage that is crappy, at least it will be crappy in different ways."
Lala: "Fine. Five lbs. at a time seems reasonable."
And so I made five pounds of hot sausage this evening by way of Internet Recipe #1.
*It may well be THAT hard. I will provide an update after the weekend.