Lughnasa                                  Waxing Back to School Moon

A bit bleary eyed this morning, I ate breakfast, drank some Awake tea and stumbled out the door without my glasses.  I was on my to the U-Haul store to rent a truck, a whole truck to carry one painting.  Jeremiah Miller, my brother-in-law, married to Kate’s sister Sarah, painted it.  Kate bought two of his works quite a while ago.  He’s an accomplished landscape painter living in North Carolina who exhibits and sells mostly in the South East.

His works are usually big, the one I needed the truck to move measures 5′ 10″ by 5′ 10″.  Here’s an example of a recent work for sale on his website:

We put a four inch slice in it while moving it from one room to another.  It had to go into the art doctor, the Midwest Art Conservation Center.  After securing it with a roll of landscaping cloth and a Cuties tangerine box, just the right amount of pressure to keep it flat and in place, I drove it into the MIA where the MACC has space in the basement of the new Target wing.

Loading Dock B has big folding doors, installed to mollify angry neighbors who complained about truck exhaust polluting their neighborhood.  They open up, like the jaws of a leviathan, inviting you in, then closing on you after you park.

At that point a guard comes up and wonders what the heck a u-haul truck is doing in the museum’s dock area.  I explain that Jonathan expects me.  She nods and calls.  Yes, he was.

Jonathan came up and helped me carry the painting up the stairs and onto the MACC’s shiny elevator. This is a very new wing.  We whirred downstairs one floor below ground level and carried the painting out of the elevator and into the painting conservation room, a room I had visited while on a tour about a year ago.  This time it was one of our paintings that would be tended to the by careful ministrations of the conservators.

Art conservation is a rarified world inhabited by people who have both a fondness and talent for fine art and an interest and skill in chemistry and materials management.  Paintings are not the only objects conserved.  The MACC handles conservation work for the Upper Midwest, covering many museums, its usual patrons, and the occasional job for private art owners.  Sculpture and frames constitutes another department, textiles another and works on paper yet another.  Each of these departments has its specialists who know how to remove paint one flake at a time, how to resew a moth eaten tapestry or restore life to an ukiyo-e print damaged by scotch tape.

The process requires a 100 dollar examination fee.  The result of this work is a condition report and a treatment proposal.  We’ll receive ours in one to two weeks.

I drove the truck back to the U-haul store.  I had estimated, off the top of my head, that the trip would require 50 miles.  I went 51.  Not bad.