STITAH 2022

In mid-July, I participated in Yale's Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History, a weeklong seminar designed to give professors (not just art historians, but a couple of chemists and one painting teacher) first-hand understanding of art conservation and conservation science, with the theme "A Brush with the Artist." There were no assignments, unlike the NEH summer program I did in 2019; just daily on-sites in the galleries and labs, interspersed with hands-on workshops designed to give us a better sense of a few painting techniques. I counted myself lucky that I've always been interested in "technical art history," because if this was all otherwise new to me, I think I might have been bowled over by the amount of information coming at me at once. As it was, I found it immensely interesting and stimulating, if a bit maddening to recognize the vast gulf in resources between what YUAG and YCBA can do with the objects in their care vs. what we can do. 

One of the first class sessions in Dr. Hall's Renaissance grad seminar was entitled "The Hermeneutics of Facture." It was my first month of grad school, and I remember seeing that on the syllabus and thinking "oh shit, I am not cut out for this!" I actually don't know whether that was intended to be a joke (she does have a sly sense of humor) or it was just her being fancy. Anyway, I remember that we were assigned in groups to read technical articles, and mine was Joyce Plesters on the cleaning of one of the Titians in the NG London, possibly the Bacchus and Ariadne. I didn't expect to write my dissertation on Titian at the time, just happy accident, but I enjoyed it! Fast forward to 2012: in preparing for my exams, technical art history was one of the themes I was writing draft essays on. Here's my introductory paragraph:

Over the course of the 20th century, conservation and technical analysis became an integral part of the art historical apparatus.  As techniques (including X-rays, infrared, and chemical analysis) advanced, they have told us more about the materials, techniques, and working practice of individual artists.  Technical analysis has also responded to changes in the questions scholars are asking, for example as the field shifted from an early connoisseurial interest in separating original from copy to the growing interest in methods of reproduction in the workshop.  These developments have not come without controversy, particularly in terms of cleaning and restoration.  Particular problems also remain in terms of integrating technical data into art historical monographs and catalogs, although there have been recent promising advances.

Look at the baby art historian! Still putting two spaces between her sentences. Actually, STITAH corrected one misapprehension that I've evidently held since the beginning: elsewhere in the essay I made reference to chemical analysis of materials being possibly through the use of "core samples," which I envisioned as being extracted with a syringe, kind of like a geological core, but I learned that it's done with a scalpel, like slicing a piece of a mole for a biopsy.

Anyway, since I've been teaching the Technology and Art intro course, I've been able to apply some of my interests in the classroom, which has been really fun. It's kind of unusual to feel like something we're doing is "cutting edge" (it's Fairfield, c'mon), but Yale is only now redesigning its intro courses to follow a similar "deep dive" idea. And although it's always humbling to be reminded of the scale and scope of Yale's art collection, some of my fellow STITAH-ers were coming from institutions that had no collections of any kind to teach from. I'm lucky not only to have a museum, but to work in the museum, which makes it the easiest for me to use.

People were pretty interested by the Teaching Collection, too, which, I can boast here, was my idea: putting together not only art objects that don't rise to the level of accession-worthy, but also artists' materials and tools, into a collection that that students can actually handle and get a feel for. The Teaching Collection has our Wave That's Doing It's Best, for example, but also samples of Prussian blue, produced by the Chemistry and Art students. We have a lithographic stone and a Japanese lacquer box, both bought off Ebay in order to support education around specific exhibitions. I just acquired two samples of Carrara marble, including one chunk of the purest white that Michelangelo would have used, for my fall Renaissance class. It's pretty cool, and I'm proud of it, and it was really affirming to have such interest from professional colleagues, several of whom wanted advice on how to go about starting collections of their own. In our case, it's mostly happenstance: stuff Jim donated that was in bad shape, or the copy of the Guido Reni Madonna and Child that had been kicking around the library, and which a local art restorer test-cleaned pro bono, to show the difference after varnish and stain removal.

In addition to the varnish demo, the only real tool of conservation science that I can feasibly/cheaply/safely deploy is a UV flashlight I bought from Amazon, which can show discolored varnish as well as later overpainting. Megan was a little nervous about me flashing that on non-Teaching Collection objects, so imagine my delight to learn from the conservators at Yale that not only is it not an issue, they also bought their flashlights from Amazon! (Theirs was nicer than mine, so I immediately traded up). Of course, they typically employ a room-sized UV set-up, like the one in the photograph.

Other methods of investigation are just frustratingly out of reach. Watching them use the IRR camera on a painting was incredible, but they also had this nifty handout showing that different cameras that could perceive different wavelengths of IRR showed quite different results. It's been my burning desire to have some form of near-infrared imaging to use on our own objects. You often hear about modifying cheap digital cameras to remove the IR filter, which I attempted last year with a $50 Amazon camera, with no luck. I found a Heritage Science article on modifying a specific type of older Smartphone with the addition of a fairly expensive small lens, which I shared with a Physics professor who brings his Optics classes to the gallery. He expressed interest, but I need to follow up on that this year. Irma Passeri, the YUAG conservator, noted you can also buy DSLR cameras and have them factory-modded, but that's a thousand dollars or so (another reminder of Yale resources). Post-STITAH I discovered you can buy cameras on Ebay that have been "ghost-modded" - enabling infrared for ghost-hunters! Sadly, I doubt that those kinds of mods would achieve the wavelength necessary to reveal underdrawing on a painting, as opposed to "cold spots" in a house.

Anyway, among my other discoveries: mixing ground pigment with oil is harder than it looks (as pictured). I was a little bummed we didn't to attempt to grind any pigments, though obviously for reasons of time, a lot was pre-prepared for us. That included these panels, which had been gessoed, applied with bole (the dull red at right), gilded, and polished in preparation for us to try our hands at various forms of tooling and pouncing! The rabbit, at left, is an example of sgraffito, paint scratched away to reveal a design. We used carbon paper to trace the rabbit onto thin paper, laid the paper on the red area (painted with highly toxic cadmium red, for quickness of drying), "pounced" it with a sharp tool around the contours, and buffed in some charcoal to transfer the design. Then we did our scratching, and then we were free to decorate it by stippling dots into the gold with the same stylus. Next to it, we used sets of punching tools to add the decorative elements (a lot harder to press in than I expected), and used a compass and straightedge to add arcs and lines.

What I am not immortalizing here is the tempera painting exercise that we completed on the lower half of the panel, because damn, I sucked that that! They only gave us 3 tints, and our goal was to imitated a detail of some drapery off a 14th-century panel, and mine was...not good. If I use the upper part of this panel for teaching (if I ever do Early Ren, that is), I'll be taping an index card over my shame at the bottom. The same went for the oil exercise, which I didn't even bother to bring home. We also did a sumi-e workshop with a Japanese painter, and after he helpfully added in the bamboo leaves that I, after 30 minutes of practicing, could not manage to wrist-flick properly, I declared my work done, brought it home, and gave it to my sister. She gives me the boys' art all the time, and since mine was of about the same level, I figured why not repay the favor.

I came out of the week having learned a lot and energized to see how I might put even a tiny bit of this into practice. We have a painting in the TC that we're pretty sure is a modern imitation of an early Renaissance panel painting in oil, but Irma told me that Raman microscopy would be the only "proof" of the binder. I asked around - no Raman microscope at Fairfield. Ditto XRF (one of the scientists, Anniko, passed around their XRF "gun" and cheerfully told us it costs about $50k), which could help identify pigments. UV can only show some overpainting, as well as fluorescence of the white highlights (which matches lead white, as opposed to titanium or zinc white, but so what? A modern forger could well have used more traditional materials...). If I had an IRR device I could check for underdrawing. Even with just raking light I can see incised lines for some of the background and the halos. But alas, Fairfield's on-campus resources just aren't quite there. We've asked Yale to look at some objects for us before (our mystery Chinese plaques, which in their elemental composition matched ancient Chinese gold objects), but never a TC-level object that we're pretty sure is a "tourist art" piece, just based on stylistic analysis; Carey and I agreed that the angels' hair just "looks" wrong, for example, plus there's an inscription on the frame, Ave Maria Mater Pia, that does not seem to have been used in the 15th/16th century, based on my rudimentary research. It's a little frustrating to know we could have so many more answers about this object in a couple of hours, if we had Yale's material and intellectual resources! Arghhh.

Anyway, I contented myself with taking our pigment collection - much of it verrrrry toxic, like all our bright cadmium reds, yellow, and orange - to my colleague Dorothy in the chem lab, who rehoused them into small glass containers. Here are a few that I arranged into a little rainbow after labelling them!

Friends and Nemeses

 Sean was recently joking about the increasing length of my "Nemeses" list, and how much of the animal kingdom would wind up inscribed there as opposed to the shorter "Tolerated" and "Allies" lists. The top (non-human) slot on the list goes to the Canada geese, of course. This year we played unwilling hosts to no fewer than nine geese in two families! Originally there were ten, but one got eaten early on by a coyote; we cheered his success, but were disappointed that he never managed it again (though his casual appearance in the middle of the street would send the flock into a panicked waddle to safety, highly amusing to us spectating goose-haters). There was even a late attempt by a third family to establish residence, but they evidently got bullied away by families 1 and 2. Cue Sean, joking about my mom watching from the afterlife as we make fun of something she used to do: "Oh yeah? Think that's funny? More geese!" 

I can be sanguine about this now only because the geese are gone, and I can once again roam the property without having to be careful of where I'm stepping. There was a full and complete "stages of grief" process of dealing with those assholes this year. First, denial: I was so convinced that we'd be able to prevent them from hatching eggs at all. We drove off one pair in early spring just by harassing them, but realized afterward that that's the same infertile goose couple that showed up first last year (and got driven away by a breeding pair). They wound up at the home of a well-intentioned neighborhood hippy named Justine, who has feeding stations for animals all around her yard, including squirrels, who she supplies with peanuts in full summer when there is food everywhere. Like, ma'am, did no one ever tell you that feeding wild animals is not actually helping them? Justine caught me a few times when I was running, and in those protracted conversations I quickly learned that her philosophy on the geese (pure love) was significantly different than my own (pure hatred). 

Once the breeding pair turned up, I was ready for battle. Originally the plan was that we'd just find their nest and (humanely!) "addle" their eggs, preventing them from hatching but also not clueing the parents so they'd lay more. The first snag in this plan: we figured out that they must be nesting on one of the little islands in the pond. I did not really feel prepared to undertake a naval battle. The second snag: I learned that our pond is a lot deeper than I'd thought. It's pretty shallow at the end by the spillover drain, but our neighbor Joe brought over a 10-foot pole and we tested sinking it in around the sides - it was immediately more than 5 feet deep, right at the edge. OK, new plan: we hire a professional! I had Jay the "Critter Cop" all lined up - he told me to let him know once they were incubating the eggs, and $275 would see the deed done. 

But here's where Mother Nature was much more clever than me: everything I'd read about geese said they need to incubate the eggs by sitting on them for at least a month. We kept seeing both geese, so we didn't think they'd actually gotten around to the egg-laying at all yet. Imagine my surprise one day in May when these little bastards stroll out of the reeds with four goslings behind them! And not even newborn yellow ones, these were like a week or so old. They stealth-hatched their children! And that wasn't even the worst surprise. Geese are also supposed to be territorial, but three weeks or so later, I came home from work, saw the goose family, and then looked further into the backyard and saw another, also with four offspring. These were clearly larger and older goslings, meaning this new family had walked to our pond from somewhere (since the babies can't fly). At that point I knew addling would never word - what's the point of destroying a local clutch if these bastards can just commute?

Various stages of bargaining followed - we tried hazing them with a laser as suggested by DEEP, to keep them further away from the house. We put up an official "do not feed waterfowl" sign that they provided, to keep the old men of the neighborhood from giving them bagels (actually, that part worked we think). We tried using the "Bird-B-Gone" spray that contains a highly concentrated version of grape Koolaid, which Joe claimed he could smell all the way in his backyard when it was applied. Nothing really worked or kept them at bay for long. Poop everywhere! We were settling into miserable apathy until the day that I was drinking coffee in the living room, looked out the window, and saw a woman standing in the road photographing the geese enjoying the pond's shallow end like she was shooting for NatGeo. She was far from the first person who had done these (walkers, joggers, drivers - people looooove their little slice of Mother Nature, as long as its not their shoes they have to clean off), but this particular instance flung me into such a rage. I wanted to yell at her, and I wanted to kill them, and since I could do neither I went to Home Depot and bought green poultry fencing and fenced off the shallow end of the pond! The geese didn't like this, since their primary enjoyment (beyond eating grass and leaving giant piles of shit everywhere) was getting in and out of the water a dozen times an hour, particularly when they felt there was danger. I liked how much the geese did not appreciate this, so I bought more poultry fencing...and more....and more. Ultimately I installed maybe 300 or 400 feet, covering 2/3 of the pond's perimeter. They always had ways in and out, since I couldn't fence the part of the pond we don't own, but it was mightily inconvenient for them, especially when the goslings were small and slow. I enjoyed their confusion greatly, especially when the coyote was nearby and they would do adrenaline-fueled barrel rolls right over the fencing, haha. Long-term, our only solution is to get permission from our neighbors to fence the entire pond circumference in springtime. If they have no access into the water, they'll move their kids someplace else. Maybe Justine would like more company next year? 

My other chief nemesis this spring was in the Mammalia family: the chipmunk. For some reason, their numbers exploded this year, and I swear we had a dozen just around the house at one point (despite more published claims that they're territorial and will drive others off - ha!). My annoyance with them was twofold: first, they dug up all the early-spring flower bulbs in the front beds and just left them. I'd understand if they needed them for food, but nope! Just malice. I tried to replant them, but it didn't work that well. Second, I realized that they were digging under our driveway, making a little chipmunk subway system to come up in the giant garden bed in the center of the driveway. It's one thing to have a crack in your driveway...it's another to see a chipmunk actually using it as an emergency exit. Like with the geese, I tried many things, with little success, including cayenne pepper, mothballs, and one a few particularly malicious occasions, some goose poop that I would nudge into a hole. If you filled one hole with sand or gravel, the chipmunk would merely re-excavate; if you blocked it with larger rocks, it would dig a side-access tunnel or an entirely new one. 

Once again, rage. I bought snap-traps (rat-sized, not mouse) and baited them with Sean's peanut butter, even using gloves to avoid leaving human scent on them, and put them near the subway "exit" in the garden bed (to minimize the chance of another creature, like a bird, running into it). Nothing! I realized that his homemade peanut butter doesn't have added sugar, so it might not have smelled good enough. I bought some Jiffy, and heard you could add an additional piece of fruit as an enticement. Then, somehow, I didn't go through with it. Part of me felt kind of bad for wanting to kill an animal just because it was inconveniencing me (though let's be clear: excavation under the driveway is legitimately an issue, because it could weaken it until part of it sinks!). Part of me thought my mother, watching from the beyond, would follow through with the threat: more geese. I also suspected that a couple of traps wouldn't even be enough: I'd have to be willing to go full Apocalypse Now on those little bastards. Sean's friend McTague had done the "bucket method," which everyone agrees tends to be very successful, but it involves both a) drowning animals and b) disposing of a bucket of dead drowned animals. I don't have it in me (yet). Instead, we'll be having our driveway re-sealed next week, part of which involves injecting sealant into all those cracks. It's not going to close the Chipmunk Line, but at least the mid-driveway stop is getting shut down. After that, in the fall...we'll see. I still have the traps, the gloves, the Jiffy.

Now, on the subject of creatures I do like:

• Bees! I tried overseeding a few patches of grass with clover this year, but it turned out to be mini-clover, which looks so different from what's there already that it just looked odd. However, the existing white clover in the lawn was doing well, along with the invasive-but-pretty creeping Charlie, and the bees have been loving it. It gives me so much pleasure to sit in a chair in the grass to read, and be able to look around and see all these little industrious fellows of different species doing their thing in the weed-flowers. 
• Birds! (of the non-goose variety) The gray catbird might be my favorite, but we've got so many cool ones - I really love seeing a goldfinch winging it across the yard at top speed, just a little shooting star of yellow! Red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, and grackles are all lovely to look at, but rather less charming to the ear. 
• Bunnies! I became particularly enamored of a young rabbit I called Little Bun, who could usually be found nibbling right around our house (I liked the way he would do a big stretch, to eat more without actually having to get up and move - I felt that). Sadly, he was killed by a hawk last week - bad enough, but then I accidentally disturbed the hawk, so it flew away and left Little Bun's body! I felt bad, even though I knew that something would eat it. I'm not as fond of the other, older buns. They just don't have Little Bun's spirit. 
• Butterflies! Sadly, my monarch-friendly milkweed patch, which has boomed from the few plants last year, attracted just one single mature monarch, and no caterpillars, but I've seen a few other butterflies of black/blue and black/yellow varieties, which might both be kinds of swallowtails.
• Pond dwellers! Turtles, frogs, fish, dragonflies. Last night was cool, so we slept with the windows open. Most of the frog noise has quieted by this point in the season, but in the early morning hours the bullfrog will periodically do this staccato -- --- --- --- sound, like just four vocalizations together, which confused me (through my earplugs) until I remembered what it was. The turtles I feel badly for, both because most of their egg deposits wind up getting plundered by skunks or whatever else comes out of the woods, and because we don't have any good basking rocks or logs for them in the water. They usually cling to the base of the reeds along the side of the pond in the morning, but I wish we could have something a little more comfortable. I'm thinking of adding a log from the pile beyond the shed, though with my luck it will just immediately sink. As for the fish, we've just seen an entire school of little goldfish toward the shallow end, so apparently they're successfully breeding in there. 

What about the plant kingdom? There, too, I have both friends and foes, haha. I'm still a little sad about how practically everything growing around the edges of our property is non-native and/or invasive, but Sean rightly pointed out that our property is just too big to envision attempting to rip out and replace everything, so my strategy is mostly just control. Down by the back of the pond, I "excavated" part of what I'd let go complete wild last year, and discovered some beautiful irises planted against the stone wall that the original owners created for that far end. Unfortunately, both wisteria and the Chinese tree of heaven have footholds down there, so even in this dry season, when I've gone several weeks without cutting the grass, I've had to go mow down the seedlings/saplings in that corner, just to keep them under control. On the opposite side, I periodically have to cut the wisteria that tries to climb the giant fir trees and strangle the lilac bush, and which oh-so-conveniently shades the poison ivy beneath.

I love our flowers and trees, though! The pear tree at the back seems to have delivered up its last fruits last year and be ready for death. I got to try a total of three cherries from the sweet cherry tree, which were mostly enjoyed by a frenzied parade of squirrels and birds in the tree, and geese and rabbits on the ground. Our flower beds are in full bloom, particularly the one in the center of the driveway. Orange and yellow liles, blue and purple hydrangeas, and hot pink roses - I love it! I don't even mind the cicada killer bees that nest around the edge of the rocks (even though one actually bonked my hat when I was out there this morning), now that I know they're basically just putting on a show and won't mess with humans. 

Even if it's a lot of work, I love this place. Even if we have to deal with the geese every year, it'd still be worth it! I'm actually typing this on the patio, because it got cloudy, and it's cool/not-humid even though it's late July. What a gift!