Property Damage
Sep. 18th, 2010 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_t_220I do not know how, or when it happened, but when I went downstairs to get my coffee this morning I noticed there's a ruddy great hole been punched through one of the trio of oil paintings that hang on our landing.
I am... very upset by this.
OK, they're nothing overly special really, a trio of fruit still lifes by someone signing as H Chinn, but they're almost a hundred years old and they've been hanging in our house my whole life. If I remember rightly they were a wedding present to the Maternal and Paternal in the 70s, though I don't offhand know who they were from. Someone who knew the artist, I vaguely recall.
But I used to stare at them when I was little, and wish I knew how to paint things that really looked like what they were.
And now I am older and grumpier and do know how to paint things that look like what they are and I still stare at them from time to time, just to read the brush-strokes and know that I understand them far better than I ever thought I could when I was a kid standing on a dining chair to get closer.
They've needed some work for a while now- all three desperately need cleaning, the paint's damaged at the edges where it's stuck to the frame, one's begun to craze at the bottom from where it was hung over a radiator for years and one of the other canvases has a tiny round hole where it looks like something thin punctured it, but that sort of fell into the category of 'ignorable until we have time to deal with it'.
The honkin' great punch-through however, that naturally everyone denies any knowledge of creating, is possibly not so ignorable.
I know it's restorable, a decent conservator could fix it in their sleep, I just can't seem to find offhand any idea of a price. Which is the tiresome part because there are many good restorers but unsurprisingly none can give an idea of ballpark figures because they've all got to come out and quote on the specific problems. But in badgering the everloving fuck out of my mother to get them looked at, I'd really like to know roughly how many zeros we're talking about forking over.
Has anyone ever had a painting restored? Does anyone have even a vague clue?
There's 3 of them, roughly 10"x12" oil on canvas, and obviously the more zeros attatched the less likely it is that it's ever going to happen. There's a beautiful inlaid table we inherited from my paternal grandma that she utterly destroyed by putting wet plant-pots on, and we already know that's going to cost thousands to restore completely. A revelation that means now we just put a table-cloth over it and pretend well fix it some day in the future.
I really don't want these paintings to get the mataphorical tablecloth.
I am... very upset by this.
OK, they're nothing overly special really, a trio of fruit still lifes by someone signing as H Chinn, but they're almost a hundred years old and they've been hanging in our house my whole life. If I remember rightly they were a wedding present to the Maternal and Paternal in the 70s, though I don't offhand know who they were from. Someone who knew the artist, I vaguely recall.
But I used to stare at them when I was little, and wish I knew how to paint things that really looked like what they were.
And now I am older and grumpier and do know how to paint things that look like what they are and I still stare at them from time to time, just to read the brush-strokes and know that I understand them far better than I ever thought I could when I was a kid standing on a dining chair to get closer.
They've needed some work for a while now- all three desperately need cleaning, the paint's damaged at the edges where it's stuck to the frame, one's begun to craze at the bottom from where it was hung over a radiator for years and one of the other canvases has a tiny round hole where it looks like something thin punctured it, but that sort of fell into the category of 'ignorable until we have time to deal with it'.
The honkin' great punch-through however, that naturally everyone denies any knowledge of creating, is possibly not so ignorable.
I know it's restorable, a decent conservator could fix it in their sleep, I just can't seem to find offhand any idea of a price. Which is the tiresome part because there are many good restorers but unsurprisingly none can give an idea of ballpark figures because they've all got to come out and quote on the specific problems. But in badgering the everloving fuck out of my mother to get them looked at, I'd really like to know roughly how many zeros we're talking about forking over.
Has anyone ever had a painting restored? Does anyone have even a vague clue?
There's 3 of them, roughly 10"x12" oil on canvas, and obviously the more zeros attatched the less likely it is that it's ever going to happen. There's a beautiful inlaid table we inherited from my paternal grandma that she utterly destroyed by putting wet plant-pots on, and we already know that's going to cost thousands to restore completely. A revelation that means now we just put a table-cloth over it and pretend well fix it some day in the future.
I really don't want these paintings to get the mataphorical tablecloth.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 08:07 pm (UTC)It's really sad that its been damaged like that, so carelessly too. Have you asked your mom if she knows??
Good luck on fixing it
*hugs
no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 08:29 pm (UTC)