Answers For Presentation on restoring and reproduction of paintings

Oliver: Okay, Chloe, let's put the presentation together. What do you want to include in the introduction?

Chloe: Well, we're looking at the restoration of old paintings and the reproduction, so we should begin with a definition to show how those two things are different.

Oliver: Is that necessary? Let's start in a visual way, 1show some paintings that have been restored and talk about why it was necessary. So, for instance, a painting that was damaged by water and another one by insects or by sunlight.

Chloe: Okay, let's go with that. It'll get everyone's attention.

Oliver: After the introduction, we should tell everyone about our Museum visit.

Chloe: Yes, it was great to see people restoring paintings in front of us. 2Did you know that most of the restores we met didn't have a degree in art history? They've done things like chemistry and archaeology. I never would have imagined that.

Oliver: Me neither. I had no idea those kinds of skills would be useful.

Chloe: Apparently, a painting can take a year to clean.

Oliver: I guess it would. And one guy I spoke to told me they're always experimenting, reading up on different ways to clean the paintings.

Chloe: So would you be interested in a career in art restoration? You know, you don't actually need to be able to draw, so it might suit you.

Oliver: Very funny. Look, I think it would be a great job, but I wouldn't choose to do it. You get to work in interesting places. That's true. I mean, sometimes you'd be working in a public place, like restoring the paintings high up on a Church ceiling

Chloe: With the public watching?

Oliver: I wouldn't mind that. 3But the thing is, when someone owns the painting you're working on, you've got to get it right. What if they didn't like the colors you'd used? Too much pressure.

Chloe: True. Since we visited the Museum, I'd been researching other restored paintings. One was a Dutch landscape. It had been hanging in a Museum for over 100 years, and everyone just thought it was a nice scene of people on the beach. And then a restore started cleaning it and discovered someone had painted over a whale.

Oliver: A whale?

Chloe: Yes, 4the original artist had painted a whale on the beach. And later, I suppose the paint I was bought by someone who sought the whale ruined a pretty scene. And they paid another artist to cover it up.

Oliver: You must be right. Not everyone judges a painting in the same way, obviously. Anyway, we'll have plenty to say about restoration. What about digital reproduction?

Chloe: Yeah. Digital technology is having quite an impact on the art world. We can now reproduce famous paintings, and you can see something that looks just like the original.

Oliver: I guess the difference between a digital reproduction and a fake painting is no one's pretending it was painted by the original artist. 5And what I like about digital reproduction is you could potentially make lots of copies so a wider audience can see them.

Chloe: Maybe I'd rather look at the real painting before you hear the rest of the talk.

Chloe: Okay. So if we're talking about digital reproduction of art, we have to mention the company factum, are they and how they reproduced famous paintings that have been lost or damaged so they can go on public display?

Oliver: Good idea.

Chloe: Let's note down the challenges the team faced. What about Vincent Van Go's Six Sunflowers? The original painting was destroyed. The team had a photo of it, but it wasn't very clear

Oliver: Right. They couldn't see how Vango had used his brush. 6They knew the National Gallery had a nearly identical Sunflower painting by Vango, and so they had to ask the Gallery whether the team would be allowed to study and scan it - so they could reproduce the brush strokes in the right way.

Chloe: They got approval in the end.

Oliver: What about The Concert? The original was stolen, right?

Chloe: The team had a photo they could use, but the problem was, 7it was a photo of The Concert after someone had tried to touch it up with fresh paint.

Oliver: 7And they'd done a terrible job, haven't they?

Chloe: Yes. But the team were happy with the reproduction in the end, we should mention the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill.

Oliver: Churchill hated that portrait, so his wife burnt it and nothing was left.

Chloe: 8So the phantom arty team had to search for the pencil sketches the artist had also made of Churchill as part of his preparation.

Oliver: Right. For me, I was most interested in the water lilies B

Chloe: By Claude Monet. In that case, the painting wasn't lust, but the top layer of paint had turned completely black because of smoke from a fire. 9The team had to work out what the colors beneath that layer had been.

Oliver: And then there was Myrto - a painting by Tamara de Lempicka. No one knows for sure what happened to the original. At least a team had a black and white photo they could work from

Chloe: But they needed to know what colors Lim Pico would have used. And most of 10her other paintings are held in private collections. Because of that, they couldn't go and see them. That's a shame, because her work would have been.