Future tech meets ancient art in Canada’s conservation efforts

Earlier this month, a team of art conservation scientists at the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), in Ottawa, was busy recreating a missing piece of an extraordinary piano for a museum client. Their tools? A camera, a 3-D printer and artificial intelligence.

The experts had photographed a similar decorative piece on the piano from every possible angle. AI-driven software transformed the flat images into 3-D measurements and an advanced 3-D printer produced a near replica of the piece. The next step, printing the lost item in the correct material, was imminent.

Germain Wiseman, CCI’s senior scientific documentation technologist, says using equipment with “powerful computational capacity” has revolutionized his work when it comes to creating lifelike objects from photographs.

What was once time-consuming and labour-intensive, AI-enhanced photogrammetry, as the technology is called, has made fine arts conservation work faster and more accurate than ever before.

“It’s really evolving the field,” says Mr. Wiseman, as it allows conservators to repair artifacts in a more precise way as well as test new conservation techniques on reproductions instead of priceless originals.

“These models can be sent all around the world for research,” he says. “I’ve created models of a mammoth tooth, an ancient Egyptian bust and an 18th-century Chinese throne.”

After a 4,000-year-old Algonquin knife was found at Parliament Hill, CCI’s replicas were used by the First Nations community as an education tool.

Mr. Wiseman specializes in working with scientific cameras to capture imagery far beyond the capabilities of the human eye. He recently used infrared, X-ray and other spectral-band photography to assist Ottawa Art Gallery with a discovery about a Lawren Harris painting: an abstract drawing hidden beneath the Group of Seven artist’s famous painting, Mount Thule, Bylot Island.

The discovery led to a date change for the painting, from circa 1930s to the 1950s, to more accurately reflect Harris’s painting styles at the time. The new date informs types of paint and other materials used in its creation and could lead to more targeted conservation treatment, says Mr. Germain.

Other CCI scientists used the same imaging processes, combined with a number of advanced analytical techniques, including X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), which identifies chemicals in pigments, to confirm as counterfeit 10 Vancouver Art Gallery paintings thought to be by another Group of Seven member, J.E.H. MacDonald.

“The smoking gun,” writes CCI scientist Kate Helwig in the book J.E.H. MacDonald Up Close, published earlier this year, was the use of several pigments unavailable during MacDonald’s lifetime.

Conservators and scientists at CCI, a federally funded agency within the department of Canadian Heritage, use some of the world’s most advanced art conservation equipment to restore and preserve the country’s art and artifacts.

Their motivation: to sustain the country’s cultural heritage, a fundamental resource that promotes social inclusion and welfare – fostering job creation through tourism and the art market, and carrying historical, aesthetic and ethical content through generations.

In Canada, CCI and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., are among the few art conservation labs that have X-ray florescence mapping capability. Queen’s recently purchased a second, more rarefied machine (identical to the one used to analyze Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam).

The university, which offers Canada’s only Master of Art Conservation program, often partners with CCI on cutting-edge projects. In addition, some of world’s top art conservation institutions, such as Getty Conservation Institute, in Los Angeles, and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, in Rome, have also taken advantage of CCI’s expertise on collaborative research.

Bethany Jo Mikelait, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Conservators (CAPC), who recently attended a conference in Paris at the Centre for Research and Restoration of Museums of France, says she noticed conservators “using and referencing” CCI publications.

Canada is viewed “with high respect by the international conservation community,” Ms. Mikelait says. “It’s very impressive for such a small country like Canada, and also a country that does not have the centuries of art history and restoration as the European art world does.”

Ms. Mikelait says Canada’s private art conservation sector – comprising many of Queen’s graduates and former CCI interns (like herself) – also strives to advance the latest conservation technology.

Ms. Mikelait’s Toronto-based practice, The Art Conservatory Inc., focuses on the conservation of paintings. Last month, the company received an advanced microclimate frame that can protect paintings from damage caused by water, smoke, pollution and light.

Manufactured in China, this virtually invisible, sealed frame uses a sensor to monitor its optimal environment, transmitting data to an app for real-time tracking.

Fluctuating climates, such as Toronto’s humid summers and cold, wet winters, can cause exposed paint to crack and fade. (It’s a worldwide problem, perhaps most famously affecting Edvard Munch’s The Scream.)

The silica gel inside the frame maintains ideal humidity levels, says Ms. Mikelait. Even during a power outage, which can cause drastic temperature change, “the silica material will keep the humidity within the case stable and protect the interior from developing condensation.”

Ms. Mikelait expects the demand for such a benchmark microclimate enclosure to increase as global warming causes unpredictable climate issues.

Until then, most private art conservators will continue to spend most working hours cleaning and repairing art and artifacts damaged by adverse environments.

Toronto conservator Vincent Dion, owner of Conservation + Culture, which specializes in the conservation of works on paper, is excited about latest non-contact technology for cleaning his clients’ fragile art, books, photographs and documents, including a laser gun that transfers energy to dirt in such a way that the dirt literally jumps off the artwork’s surface.

A similar hands-off expulsion occurs when an atomic oxygen beam hits dirt. The hand-held instrument interests Mr. Dion because its NASA inventors used it to clean a tough lipstick stain from a painting by Andy Warhol – an unusual work by the same artist later appeared in Mr. Dion’s studio.

“It was an Andy Warhol print on a paper bag with stains on it,” says Mr. Dion. “I made absolutely no promises.”

His go-to solution, using a suitable cleaner on a suction table to draw out the discolouration, couldn’t be applied because the shopping bag had multiple layers. Mr. Dion, a specialist in gel-based cleaning methods, created a custom gel to remove the stains. “I cut the gel into the shape of the stain and through osmosis, it was able to absorb the soiled material without wetting the paper.”

For Mr. Dion, the most important advancement in delicate paper artwork conservation hasn’t been gas-based cleaning technology, but an ever-evolving, interactive database called Modular Cleaning Program. The online source, featuring information on hundreds of chemicals, allows conservators to test far more cleaning options than they would normally have time to test.

“It’s really efficient and often you don’t have to go the route of using stronger chemicals for bleaching or stain reduction,” he says.

Ultimately, every tool, whether it delivers a space-age beam, AI-driven precision, or the perfect gel formulation, is just a tool to assist conservators in their decision-making, says Mr. Dion.

“Computers and equipment don’t restore works of art,” he adds. “They will never replace the conservator’s experience and judgment.”