Bob Wittersheim
speaker
239 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 6d ago
Bob Wittersheim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 surface, careful to lift off just the 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 ten 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 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? her 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 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. In the studio classroom of the community center, I'd spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frames,
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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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.
Showing 101–120 of 239 · page 6 of 12
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