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Painting, art work, pictures, photographs are all valuable and meaningful piece of work that can symbolize various meanings and provide an understanding towards anything. Have you not heard of the sentence “A picture is worth a thousand words”?

Hence, art conservation is an important process that is undeniably beneficial in preserving the material for society and our next generation.

Definition for Conservation and Restoration

What is Conservation?
The concept of conservation is to preserve and increase the life expectancy of an actively deteriorating artwork or a collection of artworks. It deals with deteriorating artworks to improve their conditions and maintaining their stability for a prolonged period. It can be categorized into 2 types: Preventive Conservation and Curative conservation.

As the name itself says, preventive conservation is to preserve the artwork from future risks whereas curative conservation is to treat the deteriorating artwork to improve its strength and enhance the life expectancy.

What is Art Restoration?
Art Restoration of a damaged artwork is concerned with enhancing its message or beauty. A conservator can do both conservation and restoration but a restore can do only restoration. A Conservator has limitations while doing restoration and bound by ethics of conservation.

You need to have ethics of conservation too
Firstly, reversibility: Treatment methods are reversible and safe on art works, however cleaning is irreversible. Art conservators will minimise intervention while treating an artwork. The aim is to increase the life expectancy of an art work rather than beautification. Good art conservation service will use good quality conservation materials and the techniques adopted will be tested and in practice.

Conservation framing
It is also easy to get professional conservation framing services, using acid free materials. If you already have a frame that you intend to continue using after the artwork has been treated, conservators will replace the acidic materials with acid free conservation materials for you.

Conservation VS Restoration
The words Conservation and Restoration are often used as synonyms, but in fact they are two different words with different meanings. The concept of conservation is to increase the life expectancy of any actively deteriorated art objects and the concept of restoration is to enhance the beauty of the art objects. Conservation has two important sub-divisions, they are, preventive conservation and curative conservation.

“Prevention is better than cure” is a famous quotation. Although it was meant for humans, it can be adopted for art works on paper and canvas as well. The reason is they are very much like us! They are extremely sensitive to environmental conditions such as high humidity, fluctuating temperature. They are susceptible to moisture, biological/micro biological attacks. They need our care, attention for their prolonged life.

We appreciate works of art and historic artifacts for their aesthetic appeal because they provoke our thinking or stir our imagination. Whether we go to a museum to look at old master paintings, or come across with a brilliant contemporary art work or perhaps a delicate manuscript dating back to centuries, we are content by looking at these objects.

You can learn more about paper conservation by looking at this site.