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.
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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
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? Were 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 know 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 paintings. in the studio classroom of the community center. I'd spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frame, 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 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, 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'd 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 could 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 when 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 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, and that might have been invented,
Maybe they wanted to be, to a certain extent, anonymous, just like the people in the painting. I considered whether knowing more about them would feel like a more satisfying ending to the story. But a name is just a name, after all. And the real clue to who the painter and subjects were seemed to 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. hope for a colorful spring. I could relate to that, and 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 was 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. Sweet dreams.
Nothing much happens: bedtime stories to help you sleep · Snow Day in the Village · 20 Jan 2025
podcast
I read and write all the stories you hear on Nothing Much Happens. With audio engineering by Bob Wittersheim.
Showing 141–160 of 239 · page 8 of 12
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