Pratically, every week or so, I wind my way past downtown LA to Orange County where our lab enjoys a wide variety of professional art conservation activities. I started out my schedule today in South Laguna Beach at The Redfern Gallery where I delivered two completed art restoration projects and picked up a Swiss Alpine scene by Edgar Payne, done about 1920 that hasn’t seen the light of day for about 75 years. Click here for an interesting time-lapse video cleaning of a very similar Edgar Payne. Also, while at Redfern’s, unframing and examining a sweet portrait of a young girl gave us a couple of surprises… see the short video below:
Then, I made my way through the heavily infested area of downtown Laguna Beach where hordes of tourists on foot bring never ending automobile traffic to a standstill. I finally made it up the coast through to the next beach towns of Corona Del Mar, Costa Mesa and Newport Beach where I picked up a respectable pizza to go at Settebello Pizzeria Napoletana (una quattro stagione) while on my way to meet a private collector in Huntington Beach.
That was a fun visit! A house full of Pop Art and I picked up the famous image of Liz Taylor by Andy Warhol. We’re going to take care of a blemish on the red background and make sure its framed archivally.
An offset print on paper of Liz Taylor by Andy Warhol 1965
The next stop was a delivery of completed work to the home of a grateful private collector by LAX and then on to West Hollywood where I picked up a very nice large desert scene by renown early California artist Conrad Buff (1886-1975) that needs cleaning coming from George Stern Fine Arts. We are the art conservators of the Conrad Buff Estate of art and in the past we’ve worked on 100s of his paintings… and we own a couple in our personal collection. We also have a very large painting in the lab of desert mountains brought in by the artist’s family.
After about 12 hours, I completed my tour of consulting, picking up and delivering and I was back at Fine Art Conservation Laboratories in the Santa Barbara Area where I dropped off the items that I had picked up. Today, I met interesting people and many friends, saw lots of great art, was entertained with good audio in traffic and made money. It was a good day and a standard operation of the business model of our lab.
Here is some contact info:
The Redfern Gallery: https://www.redferngallery.com Toll Free (888) 628-9278
George Stern Fine Arts: http://www.sternfinearts.com Phone: 310.276.2600
Art conservation questions? Call Virginia Panizzon, Oriana Montemurro, Scott m. Haskins 805 564 3438
