b'THATS NOT F**KING BADS AR AH B E RTAL AI N Janet Ruttenberg makes plein air paintings like no other artist. After many years as a portrait artist and master printer, she began to paint outdoors when she discovered the vast subject matter at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Each morning, weather permitting, she has a cart packed with brushes, paints, papereverything needed for her plans that day. The paintings, done in watercolor and acrylic on paper, measure 8 by 15 feet, sometimes larger. She says they have to be this size for her to t everything in. Her decision to work outdoors at this astonishing scale is without precedent or comparison. Shes also within range of comments and critiques, like the one quoted for the title above, from a park regular who looked over her shoulder one day. When Janet rst contacted me in 2009, she had a lot of questions for a paper conservator. She had been taking strips of paper outdoors, some as long as 15 feet, and painting the view at the Sheep Meadow, in parts. She did this so that she could transcribe the details she observed outdoors to her large canvases in correct proportion. In the studio, she assembled the paper strips by pinning them up on a wall. When I visited her there, the components of eight oversize outdoor paintings were rolled up and stored on a high shelf. It was December. The Sheep Meadow was closed until April and she had determined that something had to be done with this material. Given her rigorous working methods, the paper rolls were damaged, soiled, and torn. Some soft, thin papers had been crushed, and an extremely thick paper had fared even worse where it had been folded. She wanted to know: Could the studies be cleaned up? Could the paper strips be assembled to form a seamless work? Should the work be protected with Plexiglas? Was there a better way to hang them up, other than with pins? I responded: Yes. Never. No way. Let me think about that. Our dialogue has continued along these lines ever since. Cleaning and attening occupied more than 360 square feet in multiple locations. I didnt join the paper strips because the joined sections wouldnt roll properly. This was important because rolling was the most feasible way to handle, transport, and store the paintings. Instead, we worked out methods to join them temporarily for viewing or display, and Janet started painting on enormous paper rolls rather than strips. I quickly gave up on wheat-starch paste and Japanese tissue, the standard of practice for conservation mending. Mends had to be substantial, even robust, and fast. Janet might want to take a piece out to the park immediately. I used exible, acrylic adhesive in every possible way and, occasionally, a glue gun and hot-melt sticks, tested and approved for conservation use. Paper conservators normally rely on framing and glazing to protect works of art. Acrylic glazing isnt even made this big. Not to mention that all the reections on a piece that large would make it impossible to see the art. Since theyre too large to protect with usual methods, instead we limit display time and worry about the stability of the environment where they will be shown. To assemble the sections and hang them, I began to think about approaches used for large textiles like quilts and tapestries. We adapted methods that textile conservators use. We buy yards and yards of Velcro to hang the paper rolls and hundreds of feet of archival foam to roll the paintings for (continued on page 93) OPPOSITEJanet at work in the Sheep Meadow on a morning soon after its opening in April of 2018. 86 87'