VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Cleaning William Hole

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Cleaning William Hole’s Murals
[Duration 6:19]

Lesley Stevenson, Senior Paintings Conservator: We are on top of the bird
cage scaffolding that’s been erected for the conservation cleaning project in the
Portrait Gallery. The reason we’ve built this is obviously to clean the murals in
preparation for the building reopening as part of the Portrait of the Nation project.

James Holloway, Director, Scottish National Portrait Gallery: This space, this
main hall where we are standing at the moment is a really special space because
actually if you took the whole collection out of the building you’d still have a
National Portrait Gallery, this space does it. This takes you right the way from
Stone-age man right up to the end of the nineteenth century. It’s very much
Scotland’s Valhalla. It’s the great national celebration of Scottish identity and
aren’t we lucky that it’s so good?

Lesley Stevenson: Over the summer in 2009 we took the opportunity to cover
up all the painted surfaces to protect them during the building works. That gave
us the opportunity of getting up there on a mobile scaffolding unit looking at the
murals and particularly the ceiling and I couldn’t resist a few sneaky cleaning
tests and it was really alarming. Of course we’re talking about almost a hundred
and twenty years of dirt accumulation in the central hall.

Fiona Allardyce: Well I’m cleaning one of the scenes, it’s the Battle of
Bannockburn in fact. I’m just cleaning the sky at the moment and you can see it’s
quite dirty, you’ve got the dirt on the swab there. I’m just wiping it with a bit of
water. These are the least dirty parts of the mural in fact, the dirtiest bits were the
ceilings. Well it’s been a great team made up of students from all different
institutions both in the UK and abroad and they’ve all been working in the heat,
uncomplaining and doing a great job.

Stephanie Oman: Well we’ve initially gone over the ceiling once to clean it and
right now I’m going back and trying to even out any areas that still have some
residual grime. Sometimes it’s more difficult to clean around the stars so I’ve
been going back in those areas in particular and just making sure that everything
is clean before we move on to the next area.

Linda Raitosalo: The scale is huge so it’s quite easy just to concentrate on one
little bit and then forget everything else and then you go down and you can’t even
notice any sort of difference so you have to keep the whole sort of thing in mind.

Pearl O’Sullivan: It’s going really well, yes, we’re in our fifth week and a week
and a half to go and we’ve covered quite a lot of the scheme already. Some
areas have been more difficult than others but we’ve discovered quite a lot about
how the artist has worked and the condition of the paintings is really, really good
so that’s something that we’re discovering as we go along.

James Holloway: The man who painted the frieze and the frescoes was a
Scottish artist called William Hole. He was based in Edinburgh. He was still
somebody who could actually paint great narrative pictures in the sort of almost
renaissance tradition which of course died out really in the twentieth century so
we were lucky to get that sort of school of painting before it had become outdated
and what he painted on our walls was I think are effective tapestries really. To
me almost the most exciting thing is the frieze and how the gold has come up
and also how you actually see with the sort of raking light it almost sparkling
because the gold is painted on a sort of rough gesso background and of course
that catches the light and that makes it sparkle and I just think that looks
wonderful.

Lesley Stevenson: It’s a remarkable feat for one man to have achieved this and,
of course, the condition of William Hole’s original work is truly remarkable.

Fiona Allardyce: You can see so many details when you’re working close to it.
You see how the artist made the paintings, the little changes he’s made and
actually you can admire him technically because when you look at the paintings
from a distance it all reads as a whole but when you see it close to you see the
different ways he’s executed the painting and that’s been fascinating.

Rory Johnstone: We’ve actually got quite an interesting area in this arrow. I
don’t know if you can see some pencil marks there and we’ve got the point there
as well. The artist decided to change that at some point and flip it round so he

either tinkered with the idea that he wants the arrow pointing that way or that way
so that’s a really important process of what we’re doing, documenting everything
we see and everything we do, not just for our own records and the gallery’s
records but for future records as well so things like this will be documented and
also the actual treatments we’re using and the effects of that. It’s really just a
comprehensive record documenting absolutely everything that goes on.

Nine Broadstreet: It’s been a really great project, besides the work itself I think
one of the great things has been being a part of this large and international
student group and of being able to learn from one another as well so that’s been I
think a really good experience for me.

Kristina Mandy: Maybe my favourite part has been the ability to get so close to
different parts of the wall and see all the detail involved in the paintings and the
large scale of these projects is definitely something different. It’s been really
exciting.

Rory Johnstone: It’s the kind of big project that only happens now and again
and we’ve all been lucky to be involved in such a thing so it’s been really
satisfying and I think we can all be proud of doing a descent job hopefully at the
end of it so, yeah, I look forward to that.

Lesley Stevenson: For those visitors coming into the building I hope that their
eye is drawn upward and they might think to themselves ‘gosh, I don’t remember
this being here’ or it certainly, I hope, will give this part of the building a new
lease of life.