Story Photos
 Photo by Greg Ebersole Troy Lucas, a Vancouver conservator of paintings, starts work on "The Dream," a painting of R.A. Long in his Columbus, Kansas mill, with his visions of Longview in the sky above. The R.A. Long High School Alumni Association raised funds to restore the grimy painting for the school library. |
RAL alumni restore painting of Long envisioning his planned city
Tuesday, April 11, 2006 7:24 AM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleVANCOUVER, Wash. --- We can only hope life will imitate art.
Troy Lucas of Vancouver, who restores damaged paintings, is repairing a huge oil painting of R.A Long's concept of Longview. "The Dream" shows the timber baron's long-term vision: a small but sparkling metropolis with a cluster of skyscrapers.
The painting languished for years in the library a R.A. Long High School. Then last year, the RAL Alumni Association rescued it, said Dee Whyte of Longview, a '60 grad who serves on the club's board.
The four-year-old group restored several artworks after the school librarian, Joan Enders, pointed out their dilapidated condition.
Members raised more than $6,000 for the project. Kitty Ross of Frame Work Gallery referred them to Lucas, who in 2004 restored portraits of Robert A. and Ella Long for the Longview Public Library.
The artist who painted "The Dream," Robert Wadsworth Grafton, is a "very important artist," Lucas said.
Grafton lived from 1876 to 1936 and was a "prolific landscape, genre and portrait painter" who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Academie Julian in Paris, and in Holland and England, according to an art auction Web site.
After all these years, Grafton's RAL painting wore a film of grime. Near the bottom, a torn hole the size of a quarter suggested that "it got poked and somebody fiddled with it," Lucas said.
The February day we visited the conservator's studio, Lucas dabbed a cotton swab soaked in trisodium phosphate on the dream's dingy sky.
Trisodium phosphate is a salt-based cleaner, Lucas said. "It's used in a lot of cleaning products, but this is laboratory grade, more refined. ... If you use the right solvent, and do the proper testing, you know what the effects are going to be. That's what makes the game interesting."
He makes his own swabs, using veterinary cotton. And he rolls the swab rather than dragging it. "It's much less abrasive ... You don't want to take any paint off."
As he applies the cleaning agents, the scene bursts into clarity, the way things look though a dirty window right after you wash it.
"It's coming off nicely now. It takes a few times going over it. One way to test if it's cleaned off is to touch it. If it's still tacky, varnish is still there.
"This has a nice dry feeling. The varnish is gone."
When he finishes with the restoration, "it will have a clear synthetic resin on it" that can last up to 50 years. "It will look exactly like it did when it was painted."
Above a picket fence and a few wood-frame buildings at Long's first lumberyard in Columbus, Kan. -- Mr. Long leans in a doorway -- Longview appears as a vision in billowing clouds, complete with mill smokestacks and tall buildings.
He did build his vision, and did it in his 70s. But the Depression put the brakes on the planned city, and Longview's founder died in 1934. Prosperity returned, but a series of recessions in the last two decades of the century kept Long's ultimate urban fantasy from materializing.
Today it's materializing -- visually at least -- under Lucas's skilled hands.
A father's craft
He learned the craft from his father, Harvey "Jack" Lucas.
"He was first in the whole area," setting up shop in 1963, Lucas said.
Jack Lucas helped restore the Mark Tobey murals at the Seattle Art Museum and worked extensively on Northwest art collections.
"My stepmother convinced Jack to take me on," Lucas said.
"It wasn't easy to work together. ... It was hard for him to praise me. But when he got sick, he really wanted me to stick with it.
"We became good friends. It was a very interesting, gratifying experience to restore a piece of art that might end up in a garbage dump" if not fixed.
By the time Jack died of cancer in 1992, "he considered me a pro," Lucas said.
He still had to convince the rest of the world. "It was hard to prove myself," he said. "I worked my tail end off to get things going. A lot of clientele knew I was pretty good at what I do. They stuck with me while I built a reputation."
Lucas, who works seven days a week, charges $80 an hour. "Most jobs are in the $22 to $500 range," he said, but some jobs require a lot of effort. The RAL painting will cost $4,000, "because of its size, stains and cracks. It's a massive piece. You don't leave anything to chance."
Conservators like Lucas need the skills of a chemist, the eye of an artist and the negotiating skills of the self-employed craftsman.
He has revived murals or paintings for private clients and for Kaiser Permanente, the Multnomah County Library, Mount Angel Abbey, the U.S. Post Office in Burns, Ore. and St. Mary's Cathedral in Portland. "There's nobody between Portland and Seattle who does what I do," he said.
He does work from Longview regularly, Lucas said. He showed us a French work he's working on for a local physician. "You have some serious art collectors up there. It's a cliquish world. I wouldn't share information about them."
Lucas follows a code written by conservators, he said. "Dad made me memorize it. It's important to abide by it. We don't have a panel or a board we have to stand before. There's nobody to answer to, so there are lots of openings for bad things to happen to art."
An involved process
Lucas's workshop has no windows, several 8-by-5 work tables, and vertical storage bins holding dozens of paintings. "Being a large lab, bigger paintings come here all the time," he said. "I have the space."
For the dream, "we're going to glue this to another fabric," he said. Otherwise, "it might break corners or crack. It's not hard to fix; there's enough to work with."
In the cosmetic restoration stage, cracks have to be filled and the canvas smoothed out in a complicated process using heat, moisture and a vacuum.
Lucas places the cleaned painting on the vacuum hot table, which will "flatten out all the cracks and bulges, the dents, that hole over there, all that needs to be relaxed and flattened. ...
"I introduce moisture to the back, which permeates the fabric," he said. "The combination of high heat and vacuum will relax this down. I let it set for one to two hours. While it's still under the vacuum, I cool it."
Next, Lucas will bond the painting to two new layers: a Mylar sheet and a fabric backing.
"I put adhesive on both sides of a 10-mil Mylar sheet. It's like the meat between two pieces of bread," fitted between the original painting and a new fabric backing that "makes it nice and firm and tight."
The three layers go back to the vacuum hot table.
"I flatten it again with a new fabric support," he said. "It will glue itself down to that Mylar and stay that way. Once flattened, it won't move."
Next, he'll stretch the painting on a stretcher he assembled from a kit. The custom, basswood stretcher has a turn-buckle mechanism and rods that apply tension equally on all sides and corners of the canvas. The stretcher cost $160, Lucas said.
With the painting on the stretcher, he sprays it with varnish and touches up color with resin-based paint, a synthetic emollient that "puts depth and vibrancy back into the painting," Lucas said. "It looks liquid, like it's supposed to."
He'll fill in any holes or punctures with Latex putty and spray it again.
Finally, the painting will be mounted in its frame, which is being restored by Marvella McPartland of Portland.
Lucas is not sure whether he'll ever see RAL's dream in place in the school library. He hopes that the students respect the painting, he said, and that it meets the expectations of his clients in the alumni club. "As long as they're happy with it, I'm happy."
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