Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993 TAG: 9303160070
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
SHE REVIVES AGING ART
Think of her as part Sherlock Holmes and part gerontologist for old pictures.Elizabeth Osiak can tell you if your 13th-century Kievan icon is a fake, and she can rejuvenate elderly art that's seemingly ready for the dumpster.
She's an art conservator, and she restores old paintings to their original glory. She earned the right to hang out her shingle with a grueling six-year course at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw, Poland.
The 34-year-old native of Poland earned a master's degree in conservation of works of art after spending many semesters copying old pictures in the National Museum of Fine Art in Warsaw, and studying chemistry, microbiology and other subjects not normally associated with art.
Now practicing in Blacksburg, Osiak charges $25 an hour to restore old paintings. Typical jobs range from 10 to 40 hours - $250 to $1,000. She specializes in wall painting, easel painting, polychrome sculpture and gilding. She recently finished restoring a 17th-century Russian icon of the Annunciation for a Blacksburg client, for which she charged $1,200. She now is working on a portrait of James Patton Preston of Smithfield Plantation.
"The portrait is an interesting job because it was done on metal with oils. It dates from about 1850," Osiak said.
These jobs were relatively straightforward, says Osiak, but sometimes her job involves serious detective work.
"We studied science in order to identify mediums and pigments in paintings. We can identify a pigment, and knowing the pigment we can say for certain what century a painting is from," she said.
"For example, if we have a pigment that ceased to appear in the 17th century, that tells us something. Or titanium white, that's a 20th-century pigment. It can be very useful because even art experts can make mistakes. A friend of mine was working on a polychrome sculpture - it was folk art, but the experts were saying it was a 16th-century sculpture.
"It was from a church and it had been overpainted over and over, and she was taking the paint off layer by layer, and underneath she found titanium white. So it was not 16th century. It wasn't a forgery, but folk art," Osiak said. "Again, there is a specific pigment called smalta, and this is made with ground blue glass. If I find this in the painting I know it must be 17th century."
Forgers are getting better and better, says Osiak, though in her 40 or so jobs so far she hasn't encountered a fake. The reason is that the crooks are learning the same techniques she studied in Warsaw.
"There are people who will take a very, very old painting, which is completely destroyed. They restore it and make a reconstruction and they are saying to people, `This is a painting in good condition.' They'll put a special powder in the varnish so that in ultraviolet light you can't see the re-touched spots very well. I found this out recently at a convention of the American Institute for Conservation in Buffalo."
The conservator says "there are no impossible projects," though she concedes that some paintings are so far gone that even she can do little by way of rescue. For example, certain 19th-century paintings are problems:
"Painters were using a lot of bitumen paint then, and this paint causes a lot of trouble because it never actually dries out," she said. "It shrinks and creates cracks which are called `crocodile-skin cracks.' They look just like crocodile skin and they're very hard to remove."
Even worse are efforts of some early conservators, which sometimes did more harm than good. "Early in the 20th century they were using acids for removing old varnish, they were using onions, potatoes - they were destroying the paintings pretty much," Osiak said.
Osiak works out of her Blacksburg home, and her lab facilities are limited. So she sometimes sends samples to a museum to ask for help in identifying pigments or media. Such help isn't cheap and significantly increases the bill for a restoration.
She also has consulted with one of her old professors in Poland, who was able to date her recently restored Russian icon and even tell her from what school of painters it came.
Restoration is slow, painstaking work. Osiak removes old pigment with solvents such as toluene and acetone, sometimes in jellied form. Choosing the correct solvent is an exacting task, because she frequently requires a substance that will remove an overpainting while not damaging the pigment beneath.
Recently she had to meticulously cut through the glue layer behind an 18th-century Silesian painting to separate it from a board, a task that took weeks.
Osiak documents her progress every step of the way with close-up photographs. Sometimes a work has to be put aside for several weeks to allow it to dry or recover from a step in the restoration process.
If what Osiak says about 20th century artists is true, art conservation will be a growth industry in coming years.
"This is because most 20th-century artists don't know the technology, they don't know how to make a proper ground or how to make a sizing. Also, they use a lot of unconventional techniques like gluing to the paper, and they don't allow the paint to properly dry after the finishing - they'll put the varnish on too soon. That causes a lot of trouble later on for conservators."
The conservator also is an artist in her own right. Five of her brightly colored abstract canvases were displayed recently at Art Expo International in Chicago. Osiak says her husband wishes she would concentrate on her own art, but she believes she has the energy for two careers.
"I just love the conservation work," she said. "Sometimes when I work and get a painting, which is very dirty and you really cannot see how beautiful it is underneath - when I take off the overpaintings and discover there's something much better underneath, then it's a really very, very satisfying job for me."