Articles – Page 2 – Beth Heller Conservation LLC

Bacon

November 8, 2012April 16, 2020 bethhellerconservation

This post has very little to do with paper conservation, or art, but it does have to do with connection. I was recently musing with friends about what drives blog visits and the answers ranged from google analytics results to friendship and collegial networks to the attractive power of bacon and to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. And it led me down the road to think about the ways that clients find me through personal and professional connections and the brief glimpses I have into their lives as they talk about what they value in the document or artwork they would like me to fix, and what a lovely pleasure that is, to be entrusted with their story and the object that carries it.

And I bet that this post, with the word bacon in it, will get the most hits this blog has ever had. I’ll report back on the experiment.

art, Articles, what we do

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

March 17, 2012April 8, 2020 bethhellerconservation

Thanks, Donovan, for the lyric. Or a zen master. One of the two.

This post is about a bullet hole through a watercolor. It’s about a watercolor that was the last one done by the artist before her body stopped cooperating with her enough to paint, or to go to the places from which she liked to paint. It’s about a bullet that came through the house from the outside, traveled through the painting and on out into the house, but did not travel through the artist who would normally be standing there if it had just been 15 minutes later. This post is about fixing something more than bursting paper. This post is about why I love this work.

art, Articles, what to read

There Is A Cloud Floating In This Sheet of Paper

January 14, 2012April 16, 2020 bethhellerconservation

I’ve written here before about Thich Nhat Hahn and the zen of paper conservation. Here is a lovely, simple meditation from his book Being Peace.

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply … you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father … the paper is full of everything, the entire cosmos. The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos.”