The art conservator

Aparajitha Ravisankar, an independent art conservator/ restorer. What kind of art do you get to work with? I work with both traditional and modern art and in all sorts of media, from oil paintings on canvas to antique floor tiles in heritage buildings. I work with public art held by institutions and also with art that is owned privately. It sounds like you’re pretty busy. In markets with a longer tradition of private ownership and art conservation, conservators specialize in one kind of artifact. By contrast, in developing countries private ownership is a newer phenomenon and collections are large and varied. There aren’t many experienced conservators around, which in turn leads to a lot of demand for the services of the good ones. There’s always a ton of work to do, and every job that you turn down could mean another priceless artifact lost to humanity forever. What was the path you took to get here?After I obtained an undergraduate degree in the fine arts, I did a two-year post-graduate program at the National Museum Institute in Delhi, India. Following that I did a six-month internship with INTACH (The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage). For those who are interested in this career, in addition to the educational element, you need at least three to four years of apprenticing with a senior conservator or with an institution before you are ready to strike out on your own. You need exposure to working with different kinds of materials. I also trained in London, where I took several courses in photographic conservation. It was a good experience because photography, like painting, is taken on a range of materials, including paper, glass, metal and ceramics. The course sensitized me to working with a variety of materials. You talk quite a bit about the material of the artwork rather than the artistic aspect. Is that of primary importance in what you do? Absolutely. Each work of art comprises specific materials, and each of these materials has its own nature. Your conservation efforts have to be in sync with that nature. Take, for example, paper. In its natural state, paper is both flexible and water absorbent. So if you want to conserve a painting on paper but in the process you make the paper water-resistant and rigid, this goes against the integral nature of paper. A good conservator makes sure that the paper responds in the way it is supposed to respond, even after the conservation process. You can’t go into a project with an idealized image of the outcome. You can’t impose yourself on the material such that you change it--even if it’s not visible right now, it will be down the line or under scientific analysis. A fully conserved artifact should look like itself, not like a conserved artifact. The material must be your guide. Would you say that humility is key to success in this profession? Yes—besides the training. A good conservator never imposes herself on the artifact. Also, you realize that however much you’d like to stop the passage of time, you can only do so much. Are there any other qualities you would add? To humility I would also add patience, because you can’t rush a job. Certain applications require dry weather days. Sometimes you need to take a break from the work to approach it with a fresh eye. Oh, and you need to be able to live without air conditioning! The artifact has to behave as it would in ambient conditions. I can’t help but draw a parallel here between the work that you do and the human experience itself. Most of us are seeking some elusive ideal of perfection in our lives. In the fashion and beauty industries, perfection has typically been equated with youth. But many a botched plastic surgery later, we are realizing now that you can’t reverse the ageing process, you can only slow it down. As a result, there’s an increasingly sophisticated understanding of beauty these days—that wrinkles and scars add to the unique beauty of a human being.  And in the art world,  the cracks and chips in a work of art can become characteristic of that work. In the good old days, a sculpture would be fixed by drilling holes in it and inserting a rod to hold the pieces together. The aim of the process was to restore the artifact as new. It’s still done when absolutely necessary, but nowadays, discerning conservators prefer not to alter the artifact’s appearance so significantly. Similarly, in the past they might have tried to restore a textile by buying new material of the same color and patching it up. Now, if you have a fragment of a textile, the focus is on displaying it in a way that helps you envision what it might have been when it was whole, rather than restoring the whole item. There’s been a refinement of sensibilities. Given the preference for conservation, does restoration ever come into play anymore? It does, but it depends on a number of factors. With large works of public art, where visitors do not interact with the work at close quarters, the preference is against restoration. There is a school of thought that sees restoration in such circumstances as being unfaithful to the spirit of the original. If restoration does occur in institutional settings, it’s typically an informed decision by all the stakeholders. If the artifact is in a private collection, where the owner interacts with it intimately and the damage is significant, then restoration is more likely. I would think that restoration is the fun part of your work, where you get to be really creative. Well, you can’t go crazy and just impose your vision on the work. You need to understand the history of the artifact, the stylistic details and the meanings associated with the iconography. This is where you work with an art historian. Moreover, you should always be transparent in your workings. You can’t slip in a little restoration just because you think it’ll look better and hope that no one notices. Is the conservation part creative too? Yes! In conservation, you are always looking for creative solutions. We not only use humble and age-old tools like brushes to clean works of art, we also borrow the latest laser technology from the healthcare field to help us in our work. We frequently look to other fields to see if there are any technologies or processes that would help us do our work better. Also, in a market that doesn’t support specialization, you’re often working with unfamiliar materials. You have to be proactive about updating your knowledge base.You’re always learning. What has been your most fun project? A team of us worked on conserving the murals in a sixteenth century temple in Ladakh [near Tibet]. We worked on site for three to four months. It was cold! We lodged with the locals and ate meals with their families. It sounds basic, but we got to enjoy delicious, locally grown radishes, carrots, broccoli etc. And although the project was sponsored by outside parties, the locals felt a strong sense of ownership to the extent that they even helped us source and transport conservation materials within the area. The best part of all was that at the end of the project, the locals themselves became vocal supporters of heritage conservation.[Ed. Note: The project went on to win several UNESCO awards.]