← Nothing much happens: bedtime stories to help you sleep
Nothing much happens: bedtime stories to help you sleep
Restoration & The Lady in the Painting
01:02:39
Season 15, Episode 18
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Transcript47 lines
- [00:01]
Katherine Nicolai
Welcome to Bedtime Stories for Everyone in Which Nothing Much Happens. You feel good and then you fall asleep. I'm Katherine Nicolai. I write and read all the stories you'll hear on Nothing Much Happens. Audio engineering is by Bob Wittersheim. We give to a different charity each week and this week we are giving to glaad, GLBTQ advocates and defenders working to create a just society free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression. You can learn more about them in our show notes. We also have links in our notes to our ad free and bonus subscriptions. Our super cozy merch, including our new coloring set and weighted pillow. Your support makes this possible. Now, Bob and I are taking this week off, so we're bringing you a special episode. It's a two parter that has never appeared in front of the paywall. We've put it all together into one so that you get an extra long bedtime story tonight. Enjoy. Now you know how this works. I've prepared a place for you to tuck into and rest. All you need to do is let your attention rest on the shape of the story and the sound of my voice. Of course, I'll read the story twice, going a little slower the second time through. Just shifting your attention from the background static of your thoughts to the gentle structure of my tail will transfer brain activity into the task positive mode. And that is when you will fall asleep. Our stories tonight are called Restoration and the lady in the Painting. And they are stories about an inherited treasure and the tale it has to tell. It's also about the precious gift of a common moment preserved in paint. The feeling of knowing someone you've never met, clues on a scrap of paper, and the feeling of being so connected to what you're doing that time passes without notice. Now, lights out. Get comfy. Notice how the sheets feel against your skin, how heavy and tired your limbs are. You are about to fall asleep and you will sleep deeply all night. Take a slow breath in through your.
- [03:36]
Bob Wittersheim
Nose.
- [03:39]
Katherine Nicolai
And out through your mouth. Do it again. Breathe in. And out.
- [03:55]
Bob Wittersheim
Good restoration. It had started with the painting in the hall, one that had been handed down through the generations of our family. It had hung for most of my young life in the living room of a great uncle. Above his fireplace, in fact, which accounted for all the soot that clouded its surface when it had come to me. I'd carried it from one room to another, trying to find the right spot for it where the light would show the details that had been painted into place a hundred plus years before. Finally, I settled for a spot in the hallway that led from the kitchen to the stairs. Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy, and there it had stayed for 10 years or so. Then, at the end of a summer when kids were going back to school and the sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay, I'd found a class in the community education brochure for art restoration, step by step, and thought of the painting in it. A woman in simple clothes looked over her shoulder, out a window behind her to a green landscape. She held a book in one hand, and the room she sat in was paneled in wood with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head. There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought might be a signature. I'd taken her down from her nail and signed up for class. She and I had spent the next few months at the community center, where we'd gotten to know each other a lot better. It is a strange thing to spend so much time with your attention centered on one face. It felt like a kind of communion, not just with the subject but with the painter, whoever they were. And finding out had been the most intriguing part of the process. We'd started, the half dozen of us in the class plus the teacher, by carefully freeing our paintings from their frames. It had taken patience and a bit of hard work to take out the tacks that had been in place so long, but once it was done, we'd each laid our canvases or boards on clean workspaces and looked at their backs. One of my fellow students had a painting found at a garage sale, and though any work of art has value, his piece, a Simple Vase of Flowers, was being restored more for the experience of working on it than the piece itself. The flowers had been painted on a piece of board, and on its back we found a signature, an ink pen with a date. It had sent us all into a fever of curiosity. Who was the woman who'd painted the flowers, and what was her life like? Her restorer had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school, and he'd brought it in for us to have a look at. We crowded around his table and peered down at her picture, taken almost 50 years before. She had a big 70s collar and natural hair in a high puff. She'd been in the winter drama that year and played volleyball and, at least according to the date on the back of the board, painted those flowers. I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her. It felt like reading the last chapter In a good book, I found I appreciated her painting even more. It meant more to me knowing something about her, and it made me even more curious about my painting, the woman seated in that room, and whoever it was who painted her. When I'd first opened the back of the frame, I'd hoped there would be a label, a tag, something to send me in a clearer direction. But all I'd found was a scrap.
- [10:44]
Unnamed Student
Of paper that had a few words.
- [10:47]
Bob Wittersheim
On it, and most of them had been cut in half. When the scrap was torn from a larger sheet, there was what I suspected was half of a name, a surname that might have been the painter's. There was also a city and a bit of a date. I thought about those scraps of information while I worked on the surface of the painting. Restoring and conserving important works of art takes a level of skill and study that we knew we wouldn't be approaching in our semester at the community center. We kept it simple. We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers and reframe our pieces and learn the best way to care for them going forward. I liked taking a new thin dowel from the tray on my workbench, tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip till I had a long swab. Most often I cleaned just with water, working my way slowly over the surface of the painting as I did. Hidden details I'd never seen before emerged in the green space through the window. I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance, dotted with minuscule houses. Among the bottles and jars on the shelf was a small black key propped against a cup. What door did that open? The woman herself became much more human. There were lines around her mouth, as if she'd spent many years smiling and laughing, and her hair, which had seemed a simple, plain color, turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in. It seemed that every time I sat down to work on another square inch of the canvas, time would race past me and I'd be shocked to hear that my hours in the studio were up. I got so connected to what I was doing that I lost track of anything else. Many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me as I looked closer at the scene on my easel. When I got to that dark smudge in the corner, I held my breath. My teacher stood beside me and a few others crowded around. We were all invested in each of the pieces that we'd brought in and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt to decipher the artist. I'd plucked my swab from the tray, wound it with a fresh bit of cotton, and dampened it just a bit in a saucer of clear water, then bit by bit, rolled it over the.
- [15:54]
Unnamed Student
Surface, careful to lift off just the.
- [16:00]
Bob Wittersheim
Soot and not any chips of paint. A few letters began to emerge, like shapes coming clear from a retreating fog. My teacher reached out to stop my wrist and leaned in closer, adjusting the glasses on her nose. I know that name, she said. The painting itself had become clearer, richer, and now the story of the lady in it would too. To be continued for now. The lady in the painting. She'd been watching over me for years from her bench in the painting, hung for a long time in my uncle's living room, and then for the last 10 years or so from the front hall of my own house, I'd see her lit with daylight as I took my keys from the bowl on the entryway table on my way out for the day, and then lit with a.
- [17:47]
Unnamed Student
Low light of the hallway lamp on.
- [17:52]
Bob Wittersheim
My way up to bed at the end of the night. She sat with a book in her hand, looking over her shoulder through the window behind her. She had one finger tucked into the pages to hold her place, and I wondered what had called her attention away from what she'd been reading.
- [18:26]
Unnamed Student
To look outside.
- [18:30]
Bob Wittersheim
Was a child calling or an animal eating from the plants in the garden, friends coming to have a cup of tea and chat, a neighbor needing to borrow a tool from the barn? Had she just fallen into a daydream and turned her face to the light? I knew that feeling of being pulled.
- [19:04]
Unnamed Student
Into the broad sea of what if.
- [19:08]
Bob Wittersheim
And forgetting where you were or what you'd planned. I found myself floating through it a lot as I worked to restore her in the studio classroom of the community center. I'd spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frame, cleaning the surface of the canvas and securing any loose paint so that not a chip was lost. We'd found a small tear in the surface near the bottom of the painting. The fibers of the canvas were split and in danger of fraying. My teacher had helped me to apply a patch to the back of the.
- [20:13]
Unnamed Student
Piece.
- [20:16]
Bob Wittersheim
A sort of bandage that would hold the fibers in place, and then we had worked to match the colors and dab them on gently. Just color matching could be a life's long work, it seemed, and the small repair had taken me a solid week, but now you could barely make out where the fix had been done.
- [20:55]
Unnamed Student
Something I was very Proud of.
- [21:00]
Bob Wittersheim
Some might think that a whole week spent on a small spot the size.
- [21:09]
Unnamed Student
Of a silver dollar would be tedious.
- [21:16]
Bob Wittersheim
But I found it thrilling. It was like a puzzle that I knew could be solved if only I stayed at my bench, and I found myself thinking of it when I woke up each morning about what the next step would be and what tools I'd.
- [21:45]
Unnamed Student
Use in the process.
- [21:49]
Bob Wittersheim
In the studio we had a collection of brushes and swabs.
- [21:58]
Unnamed Student
Bottles of purified water and mild olive oil based soaps. There were small hammers to put tacks back into place, cans of varnish and strips of gentle adhesive paints and magnifiers, something like a jeweler's loop that would be worn right on your head and focused in front of your eyes. I liked those a lot and marveled at the small things I'd spot in the painting when I had them on that I'd never have otherwise known about. It was a bit like finding a message in a bottle, something written years ago and waiting for the right person to open up and know again. Once the painting was clean and restored, I'd covered the surface in a smooth layer of varnish, which sealed and protected it, but also gave it a satisfying and uniform shine. As it sat to cure in a corner of the shop, my teacher and I dug into the hunt for the artist who'd painted this piece. We had a scrap of paper we'd found stuck to the back of the canvas, and we'd taken it from the frame. It had a few letters that might be part of a last name, also a city, and what I took to be a date. If I was right, my painting had been made in September, 142 years before. While I'd been in the process of cleaning all those years of soot and dust from the piece, we'd found a small and barely decipherable signature in the bottom right corner. Thankfully, my teacher had recognized it, otherwise I'm sure it would still be a mystery. The painter wasn't famous, though, just a favorite of hers who had painted for 30 years or more, mostly portraits of people who were themselves also not famous. She showed me a small collection of them in a book, and I attentively looked at each one. There was a man sitting with a bowl of soup in front of him, tearing a piece of bread from a.
- [25:36]
Bob Wittersheim
Loaf.
- [25:39]
Unnamed Student
And, it seemed, talking to someone not pictured. There was a family walking in a field, someone in a thick winter coat reaching out to buy a newspaper at.
- [25:59]
Bob Wittersheim
A stand.
- [26:03]
Unnamed Student
A woman planting a bulb in a flower garden.
- [26:09]
Bob Wittersheim
Like the lady.
- [26:10]
Unnamed Student
In my painting, none of these people were looking at the painter. They'd been captured in something more like a casual photograph, just living and being observed while they did it. Mine wasn't in the book, and neither was much about the painter themselves. They were known only by a first initial and a surname that might have been invented. Maybe they wanted to be, to a certain extent, anonymous, just like the people in the paintings. I considered whether knowing more about them would feel like a more satisfying ending to the story. But a name was just a name, after all, and the real clue to who the painter and subjects were lay in the work itself. This was a person who admired simple aspects of living. A meal, a day in the sun, a connection to the world, a hope for a colorful spring. I could relate to that when it was enough. So who was this woman? I guess I'd never know her exact details, but I felt a kinship with her. She read books, and so did I. She had a cluttered kitchen, and so did I. She looked off into the distance and wondered, called out to visiting friends or watched her children play, and I understood all of that. People are not so different, no matter what century they live in. When the painting was dry and ready to be rehung, I set it back in its original frame. I'd even kept the tacks and hammered them into place. The canvas itself had become a little stretched out with gravity and time, and one step in my process had been to mist some hot water onto the back of the painting and set it out in the sunlight. As it dried, the fibers shrank back into their original shape and the surface became taut again. I'd learned so much over the semester, not just about the process of restoration, conservation, but about what it might be like to capture a moment and save it for another generation. I was proud, as I looped the hanging wire over the hook in my.
- [30:03]
Bob Wittersheim
Wall.
- [30:05]
Unnamed Student
To have saved this moment, which I would pass down again when the time was right. I stood back a few paces and looked at the scene I knew so well. A woman, a book, a window. Ordinary magic.
- [30:34]
Bob Wittersheim
Restoration. It had started with a painting in the hall, one that had been handed down through the generations of her family. It had hung for most of my young life in the living room of a great uncle, above his fireplace, in fact, which accounted for all the soot that clouded its surface when it had come to me. I'd carried it from one room to another, trying to find the right spot for it, where the light would show the details that had been painted into place. A hundred plus years before. Finally I settled for a spot in.
- [31:55]
Unnamed Student
The hallway.
- [31:58]
Bob Wittersheim
That led from the kitchen to the stairs. Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy, and there it had stayed for 10 years or so. Then, at the end of a summer when kids were going back to school and sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay, I'd found a class in the community education brochure for art restoration. Step by step, and I thought of the painting. In it a woman in simple clothes looked over her shoulder out of a window behind her to a green landscape. She held a book in one hand, and the room she sat in was paneled in wood with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head. There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought might be a signature. I'd taken her down from her nail and signed up for the class. She and I had spent the next few months at the community center, where we'd gotten to know each other a lot better. It is a strange thing to spend so much time.
- [34:19]
Unnamed Student
With.
- [34:19]
Bob Wittersheim
Your attention centered on one face felt like a kind of communion, not just with the subject but with the painter, whoever they are. And finding out had been the most intriguing part of the process. We'd started, the half dozen of us in the class plus the teacher, by carefully freeing our paintings from their frames. It had taken patience and a bit of hard work to take out the tacks that had been in place for so long, but once it was done.
- [35:23]
Unnamed Student
We each laid our canvases or boards.
- [35:29]
Bob Wittersheim
On clean workspaces and looked at their backs. One of my fellow students had a painting found at a garage sale, and though any work of art has value, his piece, a Simple Vase of Flowers, was being restored more for the experience of working on it than the work itself. The flowers had been painted on a piece of board, and on its back we'd found a signature in ink pen with a date. It had sent us all into a fever of curiosity. Who was the woman who had painted the flowers, and what was her life like? Her restorer had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school, and he'd brought it in for us all to look at. We'd crowded around his table and peered down at her picture, taken almost 50 years before. She had a big 70s collar and natural hair in a high puff. She'd been in the winter drama that year and played volleyball and, at least according to the date on the back.
- [37:45]
Unnamed Student
Of the board.
- [37:48]
Bob Wittersheim
Painted those flowers. I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her it felt like reading the last chapter in a good book. I found I appreciated her painting even more. It meant more to me knowing something about her, and it made me even more curious about my painting, the woman seated in that room, and whoever it was who painted her. When I'd first opened the back of the frame, I'd hoped there would be a label, a tag, something to send me in a clear direction. But all I'd found was a scrap.
- [38:57]
Unnamed Student
Of paper that had a few words.
- [39:00]
Bob Wittersheim
On it, and most of them had been cut in half. When the scrap was torn from a larger sheet, there was what I suspected was half of a name, a surname that might have been the painter's. There was also a city and a bit of a date. I thought about those scraps of information while I worked on the surface of the painting. Restoring and conserving important works of art takes a level of skill and study that we knew we wouldn't even be approaching in our semester at the community center. We kept it simple. We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers and reframe our pieces and learn the best way to care for them going forward. I liked taking a new thin dowel from the tray on my workbench, tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip till I had a long swab. Most often I cleaned just with water, working my way slowly over the surface of the painting. As I did, hidden details I'd never seen before emerged in the green space through the window, I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance, dotted with minuscule houses. Among the bottles and jars on the shelf was a small black key propped against a cup. What door did that open? The woman herself became much more human. There were lines around her mouth, as if she'd spent many years smiling and laughing, and her hair, which it seemed a simple, plain color, turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in. It seemed that every time I sat down to work on another square inch of the canvas, time would race past me and I'd be shocked to hear that my hours in the studio were up. I got so connected to what I was doing that I lost track of anything else. Many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me as I looked closer at the scene on my easel. When I got to that dark smudge in the corner, I held my breath. My teachers stood beside me and a few others crowded around. We were all invested, and each of the pieces that we'd brought in and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt to decipher the artist. I plucked my swab from the tray, wound it with a fresh bit of cotton, and dampened it just a bit in a saucer of clear water, then bit by bit, rolled it over the surface.
- [44:19]
Unnamed Student
Careful to lift off just the.
- [44:22]
Bob Wittersheim
Soot and not any chips of paint. A few letters began to emerge, like shapes coming clear from a retreating fog. My teacher reached out to stop my wrist and leaned in closer, adjusting the glasses on her nose. I know that name, she said. The painting itself had become clearer, richer, and now the story of the lady in it would too. To be continued. For now.
- [45:24]
Unnamed Student
The lady in the painting. She'd been watching over me for years from her bench in the painting hung for a long time in my uncle's living room, and then for the last 10 years or so from the front hall of my own house, I'd see her lit with daylight as I took my keys from the bowl on the entryway table on my way out for.
- [46:16]
Bob Wittersheim
The day.
- [46:19]
Unnamed Student
And then lit with the low light of the hallway lamp on my way up to bed at the end of the night. She sat with a book in her hand, looking over her shoulder through the window behind her. She had one finger tucked into the pages to hold her place, and I wondered what had called her attention away from what she'd been reading. To look outside was a child calling or an animal eating from the plants in the garden? Were friends coming to have a cup of tea and chat? A neighbor needing to borrow a tool from the barn? Had she just fallen into a daydream and turned her face to the light? I know that feeling of being pulled into the broad sea of what if and forgetting where you were or what you'd planned. I found myself floating through it a lot as I worked to restore her painting in the studio classroom of the community center. I spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frame, cleaning the surface of the canvas and securing any loose paint so that not a chip was lost. We'd found a small tear in the surface near the bottom of the painting. The fibers of the canvas were split and in danger of fraying. My teacher had helped me to apply a patch to the back of the piece, a sort of bandage that would hold the fibers in place, and then we had worked to match the colors and dab them on gently. Just color matching could be a life's work, it seemed, and the small repair had taken me a solid week. But now you could barely make out where the fix had been Something I was very proud of. Some might think that a whole week spent on a small spot the size of a silver dollar would be tedious, but I'd found it thrilling. It was like a puzzle that I knew could be solved if only I stayed at my bench, and I found myself thinking of it when I woke up each morning about what the next step would be and what tools I'd use in the process. In the studio, we had a collection of brushes and swabs, bottles of purified water and mild olive oil based soaps. There were small hammers to put tacks back into place, cans of varnish and strips of gentle adhesive, paints and magnifiers, something like a jeweler's loupe that could be worn right on your head and focused in front of your eyes. I liked those a lot and marveled at the small things I'd spot in the painting when I had them on that I'd never have otherwise known about. It was a bit like finding a message in a bottle, something written years ago and waiting for the right person to open up and know again. Once the painting was clean and restored, I covered the surface in a smooth layer of varnish, which sealed and protected it, but also gave it a satisfying and uniform shine. As it sat to cure in a corner of the shop, my teacher and I dug into the hunt for the artist who'd painted this piece. We had a scrap of paper we'd found stuck to the back of the canvas when we'd taken it from the frame. It had a few letters that might be part of a last name, also a city, and what I took to be a date. If I was right, my painting had been made in September, 142 years before. While I'd been in the process of cleaning all those years of soot and dust from the piece, we'd found a small and barely decipherable signature in the bottom right corner. Thankfully, my teacher had recognized it, otherwise I'm sure it would still be a mystery. The painter wasn't famous, though, just a favorite of hers who had painted for 30 years or more, mostly portraits of people who were themselves also not famous. She showed me a small collection of them in a book, and I attentively looked at each one. There was a man sitting with a bowl of soup in front of him, tearing a piece of bread from a loaf and, it seemed, talking to someone not pictured. There was a family walking in a field, someone in a thick winter coat reaching out to buy a newspaper at a stand, a woman planting a Bulb in a flower garden. Like the lady in my painting. None of these people were looking at the painter. They'd been captured in something more like a casual photograph, just living and being observed while they did it. Mine wasn't in the book, and neither was much about the painter themselves. They were known only by a first initial and a surname, and that might have been invented. Maybe they wanted to be, to a certain extent, anonymous, just like the people in the painting. I considered whether knowing more about them would feel like a more satisfying ending to the story. But a name is just a name, after all, and the real clue to who the painter and subjects were seemed to lay in the work itself. This was a person who admired simple aspects of living. A meal, a day in the sun, a connection to the world, hope for a colorful spring. I could relate to that, and it was enough. So who was this woman? I guess I'd never know her exact details, but I felt a kinship with her. She read books, and so did I. She had a cluttered kitchen, and so did I. She looked off into the distance and wondered, or called out to visiting friends or watched her children play, and I understood all of that. People are not so different, no matter what century they live in. When the painting was dry and ready to be rehung, I set it back in its original frame. I'd even kept the tacks and hammered them into place. The canvas itself had become a little stretched out with gravity and time, and one step in my process had been to mist some hot water onto the back of the painting and set it out in the sunlight. As it dried, the fibers shrank back into their original shape and the surface was taught again. I'd learned so much over the semester, not just about the process of restoration and conservation, but about what it might be like to capture a moment and save it for another generation. I was proud, as I looped the hanging wire over the hook in my wall, to have saved this moment, which I would pass down again when the time was right. I stood back a few paces. I looked at the scene I knew so well. A woman. A book. A window. Ordinary magic. Sweet dreams.