Artist in residence, Tresco. Isles of Scilly. February 2018. Part 1 – the visit

Where I stayed on Tresco – Lobster Cottage Sea Gardens

I was here for two weeks, flew out from Lands End airport on  tiny plane, great stuff. It was going to be  hectic two weeks. Back in 2010 I was given  commission by Tresco Estate through Gallery Tresco to create 5 large paintings for the indoor swimming pool in the Sea Garden complex of chalet’s. Two of which were 38×90  inches, one 40×96 inch nd two t 70×82 inch paintings…..so a big thing to take on board and very exciting it was too…..

That was back then since then, oh and I should mention that as a Gallery Tresco artist I have the opportunity to do this artist in residence on Tresco every year, one of my duties is to maintain the paintings in the indoor swimming pool. Because it is a warm and humid environment I had to make sure the paintings were suitably protected from the atmosphere and all of them have been treated with a varnish that does just that. Even so various salts and chemicals that evaporate from the pool tend to condense onto the surface of the paintings and so I periodically take them down and carefully clean them.

This time though it was complicated as some people using the pool nd decided to ply so ball games and the two largest paintings had all received multiple impacts from the ball. These impacts had enough force to cause circular impact cracks. In total one painting had 19 impacts and the other had 29 impacts !!!!!!…..

 

Here are some images….. first stage cleaning

You can see the difference between the clean area at the top of the image and the rest of the painting. Each painting required a full day of repeated gently washing to remove the salts without damaging the surface

 

 

In this image you can see the cleaned area but also notice the three separate impact area’s which have left concentric ring cracks from the impact of some large object ….probably a large ball….. The largest impact here has made the canvas try to wrap round the lower stretcher bar cracking the paint in a line tht conforms to the edge of the lower stretcher bar……

These were not gently impacts at all

More examples……

 

 

 

Fortunately  the large landscape format paintings had no impacts at all. Here they are nice and clean….

 

 

 

I won’t go into the amount of work needed to repair all this……it just does not bare thinking about….but finally two weeks later after very little sleep here they are back in the swimming pool…….

 

nice place to sit……on occasion while I wonder if I will ever get everything done in time….. great view too

Occasionally I managed to have the odd moment to relax and while away an hour or two in the sun stone balancing…..

or watching waves….

…or a  sunrise…. and this led on to several paintings about the sunrise, which I will talk about in my next blog post…..

……or just enjoy the view…..