Bob Wittersheim
speaker
239 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 17 Sep
Bob Wittersheim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 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 became taut 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 and looked at the scene I knew so well.
A woman, a book, a window. Ordinary magic. Restoration. It had started with a 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 ten 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 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 with 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, we 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 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'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 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, a natural hair, and 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, and 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 of paper that had a few words 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 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.
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 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
Showing 121–140 of 239 · page 7 of 12
← Previous
Next →