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Showing posts from March, 2012

Basic Conservation Tips

 The past few weeks have been so busy, I'm afraid I've been neglecting the blog! When things finally slow down a little bit I'm sure we will have plenty of interesting projects to discuss. This post is going to be a short elaboration on some basic do-it-yourself conservation tips John recently talked about on our Facebook page. Our example, a contemporary silkscreen by Martin Ansin for the 1927 classic Metropolis.   The back, or verso of the poster has a lot of old framers' hinging tape. Whoever framed this really overdid it because it was applied to all four sides. This particular tape is a pressure-sensitive type of adhesive tape. Someone else had previously attempted to peel it off and as you can see in the photo they started to skin the back of the poster. Thankfully they stopped and left the removal to us. Here I carefully apply Bestine , a solvent normally used for thinning rubber cement, available at most art supply stores .

Flaming Lips Restoration

When we put up our first blog about a silkscreen restoration ( January post about a Tyler Stout "Lost" print ) we had no idea that we would get such a huge response. We are thrilled that so many people have sent us their silkscreens for restoration. This week's project came from that response and is a Flaming Lips silkscreen by the artist Jay Ryan. Pictured: Before photo of the silkscreen. Yes, those are our fingertips in there. Most images that are rolled we shoot under plexiglass, but the silkscreens just never look right, so we use our fingers to hold them down. Apart from being rolled, the poster had ink loss in the beautiful velvety red. This particular red is very fragile and extremely sensitive, so it shows even minor scuff marks. There were some printing errors in the red that were made from the screen being left in contact too long with the paper during printing. We weren't too focused on those. John's first step was to put the print through the is