Restoration of paintings at St. Joseph Church in Lowell, MA

VK Restoration just recently finished working in Lowell, MA at the St.Joseph church, restoring, cleaning and preserving three large paintings.

VK Restoration was selected for this job because of the extensive experience working in churches.

In most cases when we work on churches, they are not in use for services during the time of renovation. This time we had to work through three masses and lots of rosary praying between each mass. We worked 9-12, 1-6, 6 -10pm

We promised to be very quiet and respectful. This church has many sculptures of saints including Bambini di Praga, of which the original is in Karmelitska Ulice in Prague, where my great grand father used to go to services. But that is another story.

Back to the paintings. The three paintings "Holy Family in the Workshop",

located to the left of the altar, "The Wedding of a Virgin"

located to the right of the altar and "The Resurrection"

located on the opposite wall from the altar are attached to the wall and can't be removed. All three paintings are painted with oil paints on canvas but each of them required a different treatment.

We also had to rent a three story scaffolding, which we had to assemble and disassemble our selves each time to reach the paintings at the 25 -30 ft height. We could not use the lift because of the two steps in the altar area. We rented the scaffolding from Taylor Rental in Lowell and had a great experience with them. They were right on time and picked it up right away when we finished.

The first Painting "Holy family in the workshop was painted by artist G. Goyette in 1961. It is oil on canvas.

The painting was cleaned once in the past altough there is no record of it. In this picture you can see the ghost image of the original signature that was washed off and than repainted. During this cleaning some of the fine glazes on the painting were also (accidently) removed. The painting was never varnished so the pollution was directly affecting the paint layers which made the cleaning process more difficult and slower.

 After the painting was cleaned and the pollution removed, we applied a coat of protective dammar

 based varnish.