Restoration & The Lady in the Painting

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Speaker 1 Welcome to bedtime stories for everyone,

Speaker 1 in which nothing much happens.

Speaker 1 You feel good,

Speaker 1 and then you fall asleep.

Speaker 1 I'm Catherine Nikolai.

Speaker 1 I write and read all the stories you'll hear on Nothing Much Happens.

Speaker 1 Audio Engineering is by Bob Wittersheim.

Speaker 1 We give to a different charity each week. And this week we are giving to GLAD, GLBTQ,

Speaker 1 advocates and defenders, working to create a just society free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression. You can learn more about them in our show notes.

Speaker 1 We also have links in our notes to our ad-free and bonus subscriptions, our super cozy merch, including our new coloring set and weighted pillow.

Speaker 1 Your support makes this possible.

Speaker 1 Now Bob and I are taking this week off, so we're bringing you a special episode.

Speaker 1 It's a two-parter that has never appeared in front of the paywall.

Speaker 1 We've put it all together into one so that you get an extra long bedtime story tonight. Enjoy.

Speaker 1 Now you know how this works.

Speaker 1 I've prepared a place for you to tuck into and rest.

Speaker 1 All you need to do is let your attention rest on the shape of the story and the sound of my voice.

Speaker 1 Of course, I'll read the story twice,

Speaker 1 going a little slower the second time through.

Speaker 1 Just shifting your attention

Speaker 1 from the background static of your thoughts to the gentle structure of my tale

Speaker 1 will transfer brain activity into the task positive mode

Speaker 1 and that is when you will fall asleep.

Speaker 1 Our stories tonight are called Restoration

Speaker 1 and The Lady in the Painting

Speaker 1 and they are stories about an inherited treasure and the tale it has to tell.

Speaker 1 It's also about the precious gift of a common moment preserved in paint.

Speaker 1 The feeling of knowing someone you've never met.

Speaker 1 Clues on a scrap of paper. And the feeling of being so connected to what you're doing

Speaker 1 that time passes without notice.

Speaker 1 Now.

Speaker 1 Lights out.

Speaker 1 Get comfy. Notice how the sheets feel against your skin.

Speaker 1 How heavy and tired your limbs are.

Speaker 1 You are about to fall asleep.

Speaker 1 And you will sleep deeply all night.

Speaker 1 Take a slow breath in through your nose

Speaker 1 and out through your mouth.

Speaker 1 Do it again. Breathe in

Speaker 1 and out.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 1 Restoration

Speaker 1 It had started with the painting in the hall.

Speaker 1 One that had been handed down through the generations of our family.

Speaker 1 It had hung for most of my young life in the living room of a great uncle, above his fireplace, in fact,

Speaker 1 which accounted for all the soot that clouded its surface.

Speaker 1 When it had come to me,

Speaker 1 I'd carried it from one room to another,

Speaker 1 trying to find the right spot for it,

Speaker 1 where the light would show the details that had been painted into place a hundred plus years before.

Speaker 1 Finally, I settled for a spot in the hallway that led from the kitchen to the stairs.

Speaker 1 Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy,

Speaker 1 and there it had stayed for ten years or so.

Speaker 1 Then, at the end of a summer,

Speaker 1 when kids were going back to school,

Speaker 1 and the sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay,

Speaker 1 I'd found a class in the community education brochure

Speaker 1 for art restoration,

Speaker 1 step by step,

Speaker 1 and thought of the painting.

Speaker 1 In it,

Speaker 1 a woman in simple clothes looked over her shoulder,

Speaker 1 out a window, behind her to a green landscape.

Speaker 1 She held a book in one hand,

Speaker 1 and the room she sat in was paneled in wood,

Speaker 1 with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head.

Speaker 1 There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought might be a signature.

Speaker 1 I'd taken her down from her nail and signed up for class.

Speaker 1 She and I had spent the next few months at the community center

Speaker 1 where we'd gotten to know each other a lot better.

Speaker 1 It is a strange thing

Speaker 1 to spend so much time with your attention

Speaker 1 centered on one face.

Speaker 1 It felt like a kind of communion,

Speaker 1 not just with the subject,

Speaker 1 but with the painter, whoever they were.

Speaker 1 And finding out had been the most intriguing part of the process.

Speaker 1 We'd started, the half dozen of us in the class, plus the teacher,

Speaker 1 by carefully freeing our paintings from their frames.

Speaker 1 It had taken patience and a bit of hard work to take out the tax

Speaker 1 that had been in place so long.

Speaker 1 But once it was done,

Speaker 1 we'd each laid our canvases or boards

Speaker 1 on clean workspaces and looked at their backs.

Speaker 1 One of my fellow students

Speaker 1 had a painting found at a garage sale.

Speaker 1 And though any work of art has value,

Speaker 1 his piece, a simple vase of flowers,

Speaker 1 was being restored more for the experience of working on it than the piece itself.

Speaker 1 The flowers had been painted on a piece of board,

Speaker 1 and on its back

Speaker 1 we found a signature, an ink pen, with a date.

Speaker 1 It had sent us all into a fever of curiosity.

Speaker 1 Who was the woman who'd painted the flowers?

Speaker 1 And what was her life like?

Speaker 1 Her restorer had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school,

Speaker 1 and he'd brought it in for us to have a look at.

Speaker 1 We'd crowded around his table

Speaker 1 and peered down at her picture taken almost fifty years before.

Speaker 1 She had a big seventies collar and natural hair in a high puff.

Speaker 1 She'd been in the winter drama that year and played volleyball

Speaker 1 and at least according to the date on the back of the board,

Speaker 1 painted those flowers.

Speaker 1 I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her.

Speaker 1 It felt like reading the last chapter in a good book.

Speaker 1 I found I appreciated her painting even more.

Speaker 1 It meant more to me, knowing something about her.

Speaker 1 And it made me even more curious about my painting, the woman seated in that room,

Speaker 1 and whoever it was who painted her.

Speaker 1 When I'd first opened the back of the frame, I'd hoped there would be a label, a tag,

Speaker 1 something to send me in a clear direction.

Speaker 1 But all I'd found was a scrap of paper

Speaker 1 that had a few words on it,

Speaker 1 and most of them had been cut in half when the scrap was torn from a larger sheet.

Speaker 1 There was, what I suspected, was half of a name,

Speaker 1 a surname that might have been the painter's.

Speaker 1 There was also a city,

Speaker 1 and a bit of a date.

Speaker 1 I thought about those scraps of information while I worked on the surface of the painting.

Speaker 1 Restoring and conserving important works of art

Speaker 1 takes a level of skill and study

Speaker 1 that we knew we wouldn't be approaching in our semester at the Community Center.

Speaker 1 We kept it simple.

Speaker 1 We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers

Speaker 1 and reframe our pieces

Speaker 1 and learn the best way to care for them going forward.

Speaker 1 I liked taking a new thin dowel from the tray on my workbench,

Speaker 1 tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip

Speaker 1 till I had a long swab.

Speaker 1 Most often I cleaned just with water,

Speaker 1 working my way slowly over the surface of the painting.

Speaker 1 As I did,

Speaker 1 hidden details I'd never seen before emerged.

Speaker 1 In the green space through the window,

Speaker 1 I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance,

Speaker 1 dotted with minuscule houses.

Speaker 1 Among the bottles and jars on the shelf

Speaker 1 was a small black key

Speaker 1 propped against a cup.

Speaker 1 What door did that open?

Speaker 1 The woman herself

Speaker 1 became

Speaker 1 much more human.

Speaker 1 There were lines around her mouth, as if she'd spent many years

Speaker 1 smiling and laughing,

Speaker 1 and her hair, which had seemed a simple plain color,

Speaker 1 turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in.

Speaker 1 It seemed that every time

Speaker 1 I sat down to work on another square inch of the canvas,

Speaker 1 Time would race past me,

Speaker 1 and I'd be shocked to hear that my hours in the studio were up.

Speaker 1 I got so connected to what I was doing

Speaker 1 that I lost track of anything else.

Speaker 1 Many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me

Speaker 1 as I looked closer at the scene on my easel.

Speaker 1 When I got to that dark smudge in the corner,

Speaker 1 I held my breath.

Speaker 1 My teacher stood beside me

Speaker 1 and a few others crowded around.

Speaker 1 We were all invested

Speaker 1 in each of the pieces that we'd brought in

Speaker 1 and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt

Speaker 1 to decipher the artist.

Speaker 1 I'd plucked my swab from the tray,

Speaker 1 wound it with a fresh bit of cotton,

Speaker 1 and dampened it just a bit

Speaker 1 in a saucer of clear water.

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 bit by bit,

Speaker 1 rolled it over the surface,

Speaker 1 careful to lift off just the soot

Speaker 1 and not any chips of paint.

Speaker 1 A few letters began to emerge

Speaker 1 like shapes

Speaker 1 coming clear from a retreating fog.

Speaker 1 My teacher reached out to stop my wrist

Speaker 1 and leaned in closer,

Speaker 1 adjusting the glasses on her nose.

Speaker 1 I know that name, she said.

Speaker 1 The painting itself had become clearer,

Speaker 1 richer.

Speaker 1 And now the the story of the lady in it would too

Speaker 1 to be continued for now.

Speaker 1 The lady in the painting.

Speaker 1 She'd been watching over me

Speaker 1 for years

Speaker 1 from her bench in the painting,

Speaker 1 hung for a long time in my uncle's living room.

Speaker 1 And then, for the last ten years or so,

Speaker 1 from the front hall of my own house,

Speaker 1 I'd see her

Speaker 1 lit with daylight

Speaker 1 as I took my keys from the bowl on the entryway table

Speaker 1 on my way out for the day.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 lit with the low low light

Speaker 1 of the hallway lamp,

Speaker 1 on my way up to bed at the end of the night,

Speaker 1 she sat

Speaker 1 with a book in her hand,

Speaker 1 looking over her shoulder through the window behind her.

Speaker 1 She had one finger tucked into the pages,

Speaker 1 told her place

Speaker 1 And I wondered what had called her attention away from what she'd been reading to look outside.

Speaker 1 Was a child calling

Speaker 1 or an animal eating from the plants in the garden?

Speaker 1 Or friends coming to have a cup of tea and chat

Speaker 1 a neighbor needing to borrow a tool from from the barn.

Speaker 1 Had she just fallen into a daydream

Speaker 1 and turned her face to the light?

Speaker 1 I knew that feeling

Speaker 1 of being pulled into the broad sea of what if

Speaker 1 and forgetting where you were

Speaker 1 or what you'd planned.

Speaker 1 I found myself floating through it a lot as I worked to restore her.

Speaker 1 In the studio classroom of the Community Center, I'd spent weeks

Speaker 1 carefully freeing her from her frame,

Speaker 1 cleaning the surface of the canvas,

Speaker 1 and securing any loose paint so that not a chip was lost.

Speaker 1 We'd found a small tear in the surface near the bottom of the painting.

Speaker 1 The fibers of the canvas were split

Speaker 1 and in danger of fraying.

Speaker 1 My teacher had helped me to apply a patch to the back of the piece,

Speaker 1 a sort of bandage

Speaker 1 that would hold the fibers in place

Speaker 1 and then we had worked to match the colors

Speaker 1 and dab them on gently

Speaker 1 just color matching could be a lifeslong work it seemed

Speaker 1 And the small repair had taken me a solid week.

Speaker 1 But now you could barely make out where the fix had been done.

Speaker 1 Something I was very proud of.

Speaker 1 Some might think that

Speaker 1 a whole week

Speaker 1 spent on a small spot

Speaker 1 the size of a silver dollar

Speaker 1 would be tedious,

Speaker 1 but I found it thrilling.

Speaker 1 It was like a puzzle

Speaker 1 that I knew could be solved

Speaker 1 if only I stayed at my bench.

Speaker 1 And I found myself thinking of it

Speaker 1 when I woke up each morning

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 what the next step would be

Speaker 1 and what tools I'd use in the process.

Speaker 1 In the studio,

Speaker 1 we had a collection of brushes and swabs,

Speaker 1 bottles of purified water,

Speaker 1 and mild olive oil based soaps.

Speaker 1 There were small hammers to put tacks back into place,

Speaker 1 cans of varnish, and strips of gentle adhesive, paints and magnifiers,

Speaker 1 something like a jeweler's loop that would be worn right on your head

Speaker 1 and focused in front of your eyes.

Speaker 1 I liked those a lot,

Speaker 1 and marveled at the small things I'd spot in the painting when I had them on

Speaker 1 that I'd never have otherwise known about.

Speaker 1 It was a bit like finding a message in a bottle,

Speaker 1 something

Speaker 1 written years ago,

Speaker 1 and waiting for the right person to open up and know again.

Speaker 1 Once the painting was clean and restored,

Speaker 1 I'd covered the surface in a smooth layer of varnish,

Speaker 1 which sealed and protected it,

Speaker 1 but also gave it a satisfying and uniform shine.

Speaker 1 As it sat to cure in a corner of the shop,

Speaker 1 my teacher and I dug into the hunt for the artist who'd painted this piece.

Speaker 1 We had a scrap of paper we'd found stuck to the back of the canvas,

Speaker 1 and we'd taken it from the frame.

Speaker 1 It had a few letters that might be part of a last name,

Speaker 1 also a city,

Speaker 1 and what I took to be a date.

Speaker 1 If I was right,

Speaker 1 my painting had been made in September,

Speaker 1 a 142 years before.

Speaker 1 While I'd been in the process of cleaning all those years of soot

Speaker 1 and dust from the piece,

Speaker 1 we'd found a small and barely decipherable signature in the bottom right corner.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, my teacher had recognized it.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, I'm sure it would still be a mystery.

Speaker 1 The painter wasn't famous, though.

Speaker 1 Just a favorite of hers,

Speaker 1 who had painted for thirty years or more,

Speaker 1 mostly portraits of people

Speaker 1 who were themselves

Speaker 1 also not famous.

Speaker 1 She showed me a small collection of them them in a book,

Speaker 1 and I attentively looked at each one.

Speaker 1 There was a man

Speaker 1 sitting with a bowl of soup in front of him,

Speaker 1 tearing a piece of bread from a loaf,

Speaker 1 and it seemed talking to someone, not pictured.

Speaker 1 There was a family

Speaker 1 walking in a field.

Speaker 1 Someone in a thick winter coat

Speaker 1 reaching out to buy a newspaper at a stand.

Speaker 1 A woman planting a bulb in a flower garden.

Speaker 1 Like the lady in my painting,

Speaker 1 none of these people were looking at the painter.

Speaker 1 They'd been captured in something

Speaker 1 more like a casual photograph,

Speaker 1 just living

Speaker 1 and being observed while they did it.

Speaker 1 Mine wasn't in the book,

Speaker 1 and neither was much about the painter themselves.

Speaker 1 They were known only by a first initial

Speaker 1 and a surname that might have been invented.

Speaker 1 Maybe they wanted to be,

Speaker 1 to a certain extent, anonymous,

Speaker 1 just like the people in the paintings.

Speaker 1 I considered whether knowing more about them

Speaker 1 would feel

Speaker 1 like a more satisfying ending to the story.

Speaker 1 But a name was just a a name, after all.

Speaker 1 And the real clue to who the painter and subjects were

Speaker 1 lay in the work itself.

Speaker 1 This was a person who admired simple aspects of living.

Speaker 1 A meal,

Speaker 1 a day in the sun,

Speaker 1 a connection to the world,

Speaker 1 a hope for a colorful spring.

Speaker 1 I could relate to that, and it was enough.

Speaker 1 So, who was this woman?

Speaker 1 I guess I'd never know her exact details.

Speaker 1 But I felt a kinship with her.

Speaker 1 She read books, and so did I.

Speaker 1 She had a cluttered kitchen, and so did I.

Speaker 1 She looked off into the distance,

Speaker 1 and wondered, or called out to visiting friends, or watched her children play.

Speaker 1 And I understood all of that.

Speaker 1 People are not so different,

Speaker 1 no matter what century they live in.

Speaker 1 When the painting was dry

Speaker 1 and ready to be re hung,

Speaker 1 I set it back in its original frame.

Speaker 1 I'd even kept the tacks

Speaker 1 and hammered them into place.

Speaker 1 The canvas itself had become a little stretched out with gravity and time,

Speaker 1 and one step in my process had been to mist some hot water onto the back of the painting

Speaker 1 and set it out in the sunlight.

Speaker 1 As it dried, the fibers shrank back into their original shape,

Speaker 1 and the surface became taut again.

Speaker 1 I'd learned so much over the semester,

Speaker 1 not just about the process of restoration, conservation,

Speaker 1 but about what it might be like to capture a moment

Speaker 1 and save it for another generation.

Speaker 1 I was proud as I looped the hanging wire over the hook in my wall

Speaker 1 to have saved this moment,

Speaker 1 which I would pass down again when the time was right.

Speaker 1 I stood back a few paces

Speaker 1 and looked at the scene I knew so well.

Speaker 1 A woman,

Speaker 1 a book, a window,

Speaker 1 ordinary magic.

Speaker 1 Restoration.

Speaker 1 It had started

Speaker 1 with a painting in the hall.

Speaker 1 One that had been handed down

Speaker 1 through the generations of her family.

Speaker 1 It had hung for most of my young life

Speaker 1 in the living room of a great-uncle,

Speaker 1 above his fireplace, in fact,

Speaker 1 which accounted for all the soot

Speaker 1 that clouded its surface.

Speaker 1 When it had come to me,

Speaker 1 I'd carried it from one room to another,

Speaker 1 trying to find the right spot for it,

Speaker 1 where the light would show the details

Speaker 1 that had been painted into place

Speaker 1 a hundred plus years before.

Speaker 1 Finally,

Speaker 1 I settled for a spot in the hallway

Speaker 1 that led from the kitchen to the stairs.

Speaker 1 Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy,

Speaker 1 and there it had stayed for ten years or so.

Speaker 1 Then

Speaker 1 at the end of a summer

Speaker 1 when kids were going back to school

Speaker 1 and the sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay

Speaker 1 I'd found a class in the community education brochure

Speaker 1 for art restoration

Speaker 1 step by step.

Speaker 1 And I thought of the painting.

Speaker 1 In it,

Speaker 1 a woman in simple clothes

Speaker 1 looked over her shoulder

Speaker 1 out of a window,

Speaker 1 behind her to a green landscape.

Speaker 1 She held a book in one hand,

Speaker 1 and the room she sat in was paneled in wood,

Speaker 1 with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head.

Speaker 1 There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought

Speaker 1 might be a signature.

Speaker 1 I'd taken her down from her nail

Speaker 1 and signed up for the class.

Speaker 1 She and I

Speaker 1 had spent the next few months at the community center,

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 we'd gotten to know each other a lot better.

Speaker 1 It is a strange thing

Speaker 1 to spend so much time

Speaker 1 with your attention centered on one face

Speaker 1 felt like a kind of communion,

Speaker 1 not just with the subject,

Speaker 1 but with the painter,

Speaker 1 whoever they are.

Speaker 1 And finding out had been the most intriguing part of the process.

Speaker 1 We'd started

Speaker 1 the half-dozen of us in the class, plus the teacher,

Speaker 1 by carefully freeing our paintings from their frames.

Speaker 1 It had taken patience

Speaker 1 and a bit of hard work

Speaker 1 to take out the tax

Speaker 1 that had been in place for so long.

Speaker 1 But once it was done,

Speaker 1 we each laid our canvases or boards

Speaker 1 on clean workspaces

Speaker 1 and looked at their backs.

Speaker 1 One of my fellow students

Speaker 1 had a painting found at a garage sale

Speaker 1 And though any work of art has value,

Speaker 1 his piece, a simple vase of flowers,

Speaker 1 was being restored more for the experience of working on it

Speaker 1 than the work itself.

Speaker 1 The flowers had been painted on a piece of board,

Speaker 1 and on its back

Speaker 1 we'd found a signature

Speaker 1 in ink pen

Speaker 1 with a date.

Speaker 1 It had sent us all into a fever of curiosity.

Speaker 1 Who was the woman who had painted the flowers?

Speaker 1 And what was her life like?

Speaker 1 Her restorer

Speaker 1 had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school,

Speaker 1 and he'd brought it in for us all to look at.

Speaker 1 We'd crowded around his table

Speaker 1 and peered down at her picture,

Speaker 1 taken almost fifty years before.

Speaker 1 She had a big seventies collar,

Speaker 1 and natural hair and a high puff.

Speaker 1 She'd been in the winter drama that year,

Speaker 1 and played volleyball,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 at least according to the date on the back of the board,

Speaker 1 painted those flowers.

Speaker 1 I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her.

Speaker 1 I felt like reading the last chapter in a good book.

Speaker 1 I found I appreciated her painting even more.

Speaker 1 It meant more to me,

Speaker 1 knowing something about her.

Speaker 1 And it made me even more curious

Speaker 1 about my painting,

Speaker 1 the woman seated in that room,

Speaker 1 and whoever it was who painted her.

Speaker 1 When I'd first opened the back of the frame,

Speaker 1 I'd hoped there would be a label,

Speaker 1 a tag,

Speaker 1 something

Speaker 1 to send me in a clear direction.

Speaker 1 But all I'd found was a scrap of paper

Speaker 1 that had a few words on it,

Speaker 1 and most of them had been cut in half.

Speaker 1 When the scrap was torn from a larger sheet,

Speaker 1 there was what I suspected was half of a name,

Speaker 1 a surname

Speaker 1 that might have been the painter's.

Speaker 1 There was also a city

Speaker 1 and a bit of a date.

Speaker 1 I thought about those scraps of information

Speaker 1 while I worked on the surface of the painting,

Speaker 1 Restoring and conserving

Speaker 1 important works of art

Speaker 1 takes a level of skill and study that we knew we wouldn't even be approaching in our semester at the Community Center.

Speaker 1 We kept it simple.

Speaker 1 We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers

Speaker 1 and reframe our pieces

Speaker 1 and learn the best way to care for them going forward.

Speaker 1 I liked taking a new thin dowel

Speaker 1 from the tray on my workbench,

Speaker 1 tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip till I had a long swab.

Speaker 1 Most often I cleaned just with water,

Speaker 1 working my way slowly over the surface of the painting.

Speaker 1 As I did,

Speaker 1 hidden details I'd never seen before emerged

Speaker 1 In the green space through the window,

Speaker 1 I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance,

Speaker 1 dotted with minuscule houses.

Speaker 1 Among the bottles and jars on the shelf was a small black key

Speaker 1 propped against a cup.

Speaker 1 What door did that open?

Speaker 1 The woman herself became

Speaker 1 much more human.

Speaker 1 There were lines around her mouth, as if she'd spent many years smiling and laughing.

Speaker 1 And her hair,

Speaker 1 which it seemed a simple plain color,

Speaker 1 turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in.

Speaker 1 It seemed that every time I sat down to work on another square inch of the canvas,

Speaker 1 time would race past me,

Speaker 1 and I'd be shocked to hear

Speaker 1 that my hours in the studio were up.

Speaker 1 I got so connected

Speaker 1 to what I was doing

Speaker 1 that I lost track of anything else.

Speaker 1 Many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me

Speaker 1 as I looked closer at the scene on my easel.

Speaker 1 When I got to that dark smudge in the corner,

Speaker 1 I held my breath.

Speaker 1 My teacher stood beside me,

Speaker 1 and a few others crowded around.

Speaker 1 We were all invested in each of the pieces that we'd brought in

Speaker 1 and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt to decipher the artist.

Speaker 1 I plucked my swab from the tray,

Speaker 1 wound it with a fresh bit of cotton,

Speaker 1 and dampened it just a bit in a saucer of clear water,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 bit by bit,

Speaker 1 rolled it over the surface,

Speaker 1 careful to lift off just the soot

Speaker 1 and not any chips of paint.

Speaker 1 A few letters began to emerge like shapes coming clear from a retreating fog.

Speaker 1 My teacher reached out to stop my wrist

Speaker 1 and leaned in closer,

Speaker 1 adjusting the glasses on her nose.

Speaker 1 I know that name,

Speaker 1 she said.

Speaker 1 The painting itself had become clearer,

Speaker 1 richer,

Speaker 1 and now

Speaker 1 the story of the lady in it

Speaker 1 would do

Speaker 1 to be continued for now.

Speaker 1 The lady in the painting

Speaker 1 She'd been watching over me

Speaker 1 for years

Speaker 1 from her bench in the painting

Speaker 1 hung for a long time

Speaker 1 in my uncle's living room.

Speaker 1 And then, for the last ten years or so,

Speaker 1 from the front hall of my own house,

Speaker 1 I'd see her

Speaker 1 lit with daylight as I took my keys from the bowl

Speaker 1 on the entryway table

Speaker 1 on my way out for the day,

Speaker 1 and then lit with the low light of the hallway lamp

Speaker 1 on my way up to bed at the end of the night

Speaker 1 she sat

Speaker 1 with a book in her hand

Speaker 1 looking over her shoulder

Speaker 1 through the window behind her

Speaker 1 She had one finger tucked into the pages to hold her place.

Speaker 1 And I wondered what had called her attention away

Speaker 1 from what she'd been reading to look outside.

Speaker 1 Was a child calling?

Speaker 1 Or an animal eating from the plants in the garden?

Speaker 1 Were friends coming to have a cup of tea and chat?

Speaker 1 A neighbor needing to borrow a tool from the barn?

Speaker 1 Had she just fallen into a daydream and turned her face to the light?

Speaker 1 I know that feeling,

Speaker 1 of being pulled into the broad sea of what if

Speaker 1 and forgetting where you were or what you'd planned.

Speaker 1 I found myself floating through it a lot

Speaker 1 as I worked to restore her painting

Speaker 1 in the studio classroom of the community center.

Speaker 1 I spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frame,

Speaker 1 cleaning the surface of the canvas,

Speaker 1 and securing any loose paint

Speaker 1 so that not a chip was lost.

Speaker 1 We'd found a small tear in the surface near the bottom of the painting.

Speaker 1 The fibers of the canvas were split and in danger of fraying.

Speaker 1 My teacher had helped me to apply a patch to the back of the piece,

Speaker 1 a sort of bandage

Speaker 1 that would hold the fibers in place.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 we had worked to match the colors

Speaker 1 and dab them on gently.

Speaker 1 Just color matching could be a life's work, it seemed.

Speaker 1 And the small repair

Speaker 1 had taken me a solid week.

Speaker 1 But now

Speaker 1 you could barely make out where the fix had been.

Speaker 1 Something I was very proud of.

Speaker 1 Some might think

Speaker 1 that a whole week spent on a small spot

Speaker 1 the size of a silver dollar

Speaker 1 would be tedious,

Speaker 1 but I'd found it thrilling.

Speaker 1 It was like a puzzle that

Speaker 1 I knew could be solved

Speaker 1 if only I stayed at my bench.

Speaker 1 And I found myself thinking of it when I woke up each morning

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 what the next step would be

Speaker 1 and what tools I'd use in the process.

Speaker 1 In the studio we had a collection of brushes and swabs,

Speaker 1 bottles of purified water

Speaker 1 and mild

Speaker 1 olive oil based soaps.

Speaker 1 There were small hammers

Speaker 1 to put tacks back into place,

Speaker 1 cans of varnish,

Speaker 1 and strips of gentle adhesive,

Speaker 1 paints and magnifiers,

Speaker 1 something like a jeweler's loop

Speaker 1 that could be worn right on your head

Speaker 1 and focused in front of your eyes.

Speaker 1 I liked those a lot

Speaker 1 and marveled at the small things I'd spot in the painting

Speaker 1 when I had them on

Speaker 1 that I'd

Speaker 1 never have otherwise known about.

Speaker 1 It was a bit like finding a message in a bottle,

Speaker 1 something

Speaker 1 written years ago,

Speaker 1 and waiting for the right person

Speaker 1 to open up

Speaker 1 and know again.

Speaker 1 Once the painting was clean and restored,

Speaker 1 I covered the surface in a smooth layer of varnish,

Speaker 1 which sealed and protected it,

Speaker 1 but also gave it a satisfying and uniform shine.

Speaker 1 As it sat to cure

Speaker 1 in a corner of the shop,

Speaker 1 my teacher and I dug into the hunt

Speaker 1 for the artist who'd painted this piece.

Speaker 1 We had a scrap of paper we'd found stuck to the back of the canvas

Speaker 1 when we'd taken it from the frame.

Speaker 1 It had a few letters

Speaker 1 that might be part of a last name,

Speaker 1 also a city,

Speaker 1 and what I took to be a date.

Speaker 1 If I was right,

Speaker 1 my painting had been made in September,

Speaker 1 a hundred and forty-two years before,

Speaker 1 while I'd been in the process of cleaning all those years of soot

Speaker 1 and dust from the piece.

Speaker 1 We'd found a small and barely decipherable signature in the bottom right corner.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, my teacher had recognized it.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, I'm sure it would still be a mystery.

Speaker 1 The painter wasn't famous, though,

Speaker 1 just a favorite of hers,

Speaker 1 who had painted for thirty years or more

Speaker 1 mostly portraits of people who were themselves

Speaker 1 also not famous.

Speaker 1 She showed me a small collection of them in a book,

Speaker 1 and I attentively looked at each one.

Speaker 1 There was a man

Speaker 1 sitting with a bowl of soup in front of him,

Speaker 1 tearing a piece of bread from a loaf,

Speaker 1 and it seemed

Speaker 1 talking to someone not pictured.

Speaker 1 There was a family walking in a field.

Speaker 1 Someone in a thick winter coat

Speaker 1 reaching out to buy a newspaper at a stand.

Speaker 1 A woman planting a bulb in a flower garden.

Speaker 1 Like the lady in my painting.

Speaker 1 None of these people were looking at the painter.

Speaker 1 They'd been captured in something

Speaker 1 more like

Speaker 1 a casual photograph,

Speaker 1 just living and being observed while they did it.

Speaker 1 Mine wasn't in the book,

Speaker 1 and neither was much about the painter themselves.

Speaker 1 They were known only by a first initial initial and a surname,

Speaker 1 and that might have been invented.

Speaker 1 Maybe they wanted to be, to a certain extent, anonymous,

Speaker 1 just like the people in the painting.

Speaker 1 I considered whether knowing more about them

Speaker 1 would feel

Speaker 1 like a more satisfying ending to the story.

Speaker 1 But a name is just a name, after all.

Speaker 1 And the real clue to who the painter and subjects were

Speaker 1 seemed to lay in the work itself.

Speaker 1 This was a person

Speaker 1 who admired simple aspects of living

Speaker 1 a meal,

Speaker 1 a day in the sun,

Speaker 1 a connection to the world,

Speaker 1 hope for a colorful spring.

Speaker 1 I could relate to that,

Speaker 1 and it was enough.

Speaker 1 So, who was this woman?

Speaker 1 I guess I'd never know her exact details,

Speaker 1 but I felt a kinship with her.

Speaker 1 She read books, and so did I.

Speaker 1 She had a cluttered kitchen, and so did I.

Speaker 1 She looked off into the distance

Speaker 1 and wondered,

Speaker 1 or called out to visiting friends,

Speaker 1 or watched her children play.

Speaker 1 And I understood all of that.

Speaker 1 People are not so different,

Speaker 1 no matter what century they live in.

Speaker 1 When the painting was dry

Speaker 1 and ready to be re-hung,

Speaker 1 I set it back in its original frame.

Speaker 1 I'd even kept the tacks and hammered them into place.

Speaker 1 The canvas itself had become a little stretched out with gravity and time,

Speaker 1 and one step in my process had been to mist some hot water onto the back of the painting

Speaker 1 and set it out in the sunlight.

Speaker 1 As As it dried, the fibers shrank back into their original shape,

Speaker 1 and the surface was taut again.

Speaker 1 I'd learned so much over the semester,

Speaker 1 not just about the process of restoration and conservation,

Speaker 1 but about what it might be like to capture a moment

Speaker 1 and save it for another generation.

Speaker 1 I was proud as I looped the hanging wire over the hook in my wall

Speaker 1 to have saved this moment,

Speaker 1 which I would pass down again when the time was right.

Speaker 1 I stood back a few paces

Speaker 1 and looked at the scene I knew so well.

Speaker 1 A woman, a book,

Speaker 1 a window,

Speaker 1 ordinary magic,

Speaker 1 sweet dreams.