Joburg art restorer brings treasures back to their former glory

Artworks are living things — they expand and contract as temperatures rise and fall, they age as light and humidity take their toll and they decay as insects find their way between frame and board to consume paper. They’re vulnerable in the face of fire, fragile to movement of mount and nail, and can offer no defence against malicious assault.

Corporeal though they may be, artworks don’t share the living body’s defences or healing ability — a torn artwork can’t reknit its rent fibres.

Much like the body needs to be saved or maintained by a medical professional, so living artworks need conservation and restoration — and Johannesburg-based expert Ernest Bellingan is likely SA's leading expert in saving works in wood, clay, paper, print, mixed media and oil from the ravages of time and the accidents of nature.

With an academic history including an honours degree in science and conservation from the London Institute of Art and a diploma in the chemistry and history of pigments from the University of Chicago, as well as practical experience gleaned during work at the Louvre, Rijksmuseum, British Museum, National Gallery of Scotland and as head paper conservator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Bellingan brings an artist’s eye, a historian’s appreciation, a scientist’s analysis and a medical professional’s compassion to conserving and restoring artworks of all types.

In the art world, restoration speaks to the corrective and restorative measures employed to compensate for damage, deterioration and other defects. The aim is to restore the work to its original condition — and, if this is physically impossible, to a satisfactory state that belies any damage, which must be reversible by the restorer or another expert, generations away. Conservation, on the other hand, speaks to preventive care and maintenance of artworks through remedial treatments. Where a conservator is a general practitioner, a restorer is a surgeon — and Bellingan is both.

His job blends art, science and detective work in bringing works of art — from the sentimental family photograph to the priceless work of a master — back to life, or at the very least to something resembling their former glory. His tools are solvents, solutions, cloths, blades, brushes and presses, but their application is rooted in a deep appreciation for returning the seemingly unsalvageable to a flawless work, once more.

“A lot of my work is as much about preserving memory as it is about protecting an investment,” he says. “Any work is priceless to the owner if it carries sentimental value, and often those works, handed down through generations, are the ones that need the most restoration because of the way their travels through time have been handled”.

Works placed in sunlight fade; a painting that spends decades in the home of a smoker dims under the pall of chemicals, and poorly-conceived — though well-meant — work degrades as its components fail to find concord with themselves and their surroundings.

Indeed, some of Bellingan's biggest challenges in saving artworks are rooted in how they’re composed.

“Works comprising non-traditional materials can be the hardest to save, because its near-impossible to tell what they’re made of,” he says. “That affects the choice of chemicals and processes available to a restorer because the aim is obviously to not inflict any further damage”.

It’s not just modern mixed-media pieces or works on poor-quality or unsuitable mediums that present challenges — the artist’s choices can have an impact on the sustainability and longevity of a work.

“Penny Siopis’s ‘cake paintings’ from the early 1980s, in which she builds up astounding, centimetres-thick layers of oil paint to create magnificent statement pieces, can age poorly in the wrong circumstances as the weight of the paint itself makes it pull away from the canvas, and heat and humidity combine to create cracks in the ‘cake’, ” says Bellingan. “That’s not a defect — for many artists, the choice of medium is a conscious choice in the knowledge that the work will deteriorate over time because of its organic nature — but for the collector and conservator, it presents challenges in terms of trying to arrest the effects.”

It’s not only the toll of time that restorers are tasked with stalling — accidents and malice make up a fair amount of Bellingan’s business.

“Precious and sentimental works are often the victims of a soured relationship as people take out their anger on one-off works with razor blades or fists,” he says. “Water damage from a leaking ceiling, creases from improper storage and damage at the hands of inattentive movers all have the same effect in seemingly ruining the work — and it’s up to the restorer to do their best to bring it back to life”.

Over-restoration is also a challenge, where inexpert practitioners have heavy-handedly applied cleaning solutions that destroy what they’re meant to revive, and untrained hands have tried to add elements to the work to cover up defects. Bellingan has a centuries-old work in his airy Hurlingham studio in which two figures have been added to a lush pastoral scene, but the face of one is a mismatch in its resemblance to an emoji — two simple dotted eyes and perpendicular lines denote nose and mouth.

His work, then, is to remove the poor cover-up and see what lies beneath — and to determine whether it is something that can be revived, or if the emoji hides a blank spot on the canvas that will have to be repainted in a style more in keeping with the rest of the painting.

Whether rolling back time, restoring vindictive damage or answering emotional appeals to somehow bring back to life the sole remaining photograph of a lost child that was torn as glass shattered when it fell from the wall, Bellingan’s work is impossibly skilful and unerringly galvanising as he plays specialist physician to these living works in need of expert care.