‘A massive undertaking.’ How art conservator is restoring 16th-century Hearst Castle ceiling
September 21, 2020 | In the PressFrom The Tribune (https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/community/cambrian/article244226357.html)
Have you ever been more than a dozen feet up on slightly wobbly scaffolding, painstakingly making itty-bitty repairs to a treasured 16th-century Spanish ceiling at Hearst Castle? It’s not a good time to get the hiccups.
Just ask noted art conservator Gary Hulbert, who’s endured backaches, sore arms and other inconveniences during his 31 years of contract work restoring art at the former San Simeon estate of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. He’s also had his share of soaring triumphs.
Hulbert, who lives with his wife in San Diego, works on Hearst Castle’s contract job of restoring the Morning Room ceiling one week at a time, once or sometimes twice a month.
The Foundation at Hearst Castle — which, with State Parks, has funded the ceiling’s conservation — has labeled the job “a massive undertaking … unveiling a gorgeous, vibrant, gessoed work of art.”
Knowing the value and antiquity of the creations Hulbert is cleaning and restoring adds another layer of stress.
However, as he told a reporter he was teaching how to restore the Castle’s Billiard Room in 2008, “I can remove it if you make a mistake. In conservation, everything we do is reversible.”
SAN DIEGO MAN HAS SPENT DECADES RESTORING ART
Hulbert has taken art lessons “since I was 4 years old,” he said, but as he got older, he also became fascinated by chemistry.
The leap to art conservation was a natural, he said.
“Art conservation is a blend of three disciplines: Chemistry, fine art and art history. It was the blend of all three” that intrigued him, Hulbert said. “I was always good at science in school, but I had that art background.”
When his high school art teacher introduced him to some painting conservators, Hulbert’s future was cemented.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art and conservation from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and his master’s in art conservation from SUNY Buffalo State College in New York.
He’s been busy ever since, often working high above his head and dodging drips.
In his 36 years as a conservator, Hulbert has restored the exquisite elegance of everything from Hearst Castle’s massive ceilings to a 2-by-3-inch painting on ivory. He’s also done large mural projects, such as removing a 30-foot-long fresco from a wall.
According to the Foundation at Hearst Castle’s website, Hulbert’s previous Castle assignments were a circa-1660 painted frieze in the lobby of Casa del Monte, a fresco frieze in the lobby of Casa del Mar created sometime between 1520 and 1530, and the medieval and Renaissance-era ceilings in the Doge’s Sitting Room, Billiard Room and W. R. Hearst’s bedroom in Casa Grande.
“I always tend to look for the big, longer-term projects,” Hulbert said.
Hearst Castle ceilings certainly fit in that category.
Each job is an exceptional labor of love, he said, but those multi-surface ceilings and the challenge of restoring them to their former beauty hold a special place in Hulbert’s heart.
He said his greatest satisfaction comes with “returning the painting back as close as possible to when it was created.”
While his chip-by-chip work cleaning, varnishing and painting of those ceilings have taken years to complete, the ongoing process can fascinate visitors passing through the room on their tours.
Once the massive jobs are done, repeat viewers who have seen the ceilings on prior tours react enthusiastically. (Hearst Castle has been closed to visitors since March 15 due to the coronavirus pandemic.)
Hulbert recalled that they’ll often tell him things like, “I never saw that part of it before!”
CONSERVATOR HAS A FAN AT STATE PARKS
Dan Falat, superintendent of the State Parks district that includes Hearst Castle, is a fan of Hulbert.
“The Castle has been very fortunate to have Gary not only working on this project but being part of the collection conservation as a whole … to have him not only as a conservator and contractor, but an overall friend of the Castle and Parks,” Falat said.
“His level of precision amazes me. He’s a huge asset to the overall conservation plan,” Falat said of Hulbert. “I’m constantly learning from him.”
“I think what this project and the work he’s done will really do is give visitors the ability to better understand how wonderfully skilled the Hearst craftsmen were, especially 100 years ago,” to fit that complex, 16th-century Spanish Mudejar coffered ceiling into the approximately 46-by-23-foot Morning Room, the State Parks superintendent said.
“Gary continues that tradition,” Falat added. He’s that craftsman of today.”
HOW EXPERT IS BRINGING MORNING ROOM CEILING BACK TO LIFE
Hulbert’s first task is to “secure the loose paint,” which is often in tiny chips. He uses a “small brush to feed water-based adhesive into the crack where paint is loose or lifting. Then I carefully clean up the excess adhesive, and gently set the paint flake down.”
To clean away the adhesive, he presses gently on the flake with a custom-rolled cotton swab dipped in distilled water. Then he irons the chip down with a small heated spatula applied to silicone paper.
The conservator must repeat that process thousands and thousands of times, maybe even millions, in a project the size of the Morning Room ceiling.
Hulbert’s current job is perhaps the most challenging and satisfying one he’s tackled at Hearst Castle, because it’s so complex. He declined to give the cost of the job, in part because it’s not yet complete, but did say that it’s billed annually.
“There are so many surfaces on that ceiling,” he said, on “corbels, beams, smaller beams, with little paintings between the beams … The painting is probably four times the size of the room, if not more, if you were to flatten out all the surfaces.”
Hulbert said he did a brief count of the artworks in just one area of the ceiling, then extrapolated out the probable number of individual paintings on it. He estimated because “it could take years to literally count them all,” he said.
He calculated that there are far more than 1,000 paintings on the ceiling. “Some are between the smaller cross-beams, with individual 5-inch to 6-inch paintings every so often,” he said. “There are all the flat surfaces, with scoop molding around. Then there are the main beams that go across the room, which have lozenge-design paintings on them.”
Each surface must be repaired, cleaned and restored.
The painted surface on the Morning Room ceiling “was flaking moderately. It was painted on red pine beams” and other surfaces, Hulbert explained. “Through the years, wood can shrink or expand. With the ravages of time, some of the paint became loose.”
Unfortunately, not every flake retains its hold on the ceiling, and there are “some losses,” he said, which require a different repair process.
“The first step,” he said, “is to make sure nothing else falls off.”
That’s where the adhesive comes into play.
The next step involves cleaning, which includes “removing surface soot from fireplace smoke, dirt and grime from across the ages,” Hulbert said. “It’s almost 500 years old, so we have to assume the original building was candle-lit, and you had burning wood from a fireplace, or in more modern times, oil heat.” All of that creates residue that collects on the artwork.
“In Hearst’s time, they smoked a lot,” Hulbert said, which added to the pollution.
“So, the ceiling was pretty black” when Hulbert began his labors, he said.
“Hearst was building and installing so fast, he didn’t want to take 10 years to clean and restore the ceiling. He just wanted things done and installed,” Hulbert explained, so the ceiling went up as it was.
Hulbert has already devoted a decade to the Morning Room ceiling job, starting approximately in 2010. While the first clean-and-repair phase is done, there’s more work ahead.
“I’ve secured all the paint and removed the grime,” he said. After a thin layer of varnish, “the next stage is determining how much in-painting” State Parks wants and can afford for him to do, filling in the blanks where those pesky chips fell off.
The varnish helps to isolate the new paint from the old, he said.
“To in-paint it completely would take decades,” he estimated.
So he said he’s going to “fill in some obvious losses, the ones you can see from ground level.”
After all, that ceiling is “at least 14 or 15 feet up there,” Hulbert estimated, so most people wouldn’t be able to see tiny spaces left by smaller flake losses. “It’s not like an easel painting you can get close to. It’s a ceiling and an artifact that you’ll in-paint selectively.”
SAN SIMEON ESTATE OFFERS RELIEF FROM MUSCLE ACHES, STRESS
So, how does the 6-foot-4 Hulbert deal with the muscle aches and stress?
“I try to stretch my neck and arm muscles and be careful not to turn awkwardly,” he said during a phone interview in an early September.
When people ask Hulbert what he does on his days off, he replies, “I’m in traction,” he said with a laugh.
He also makes sure to take breaks. “If I’m feeling tired or sore after an hour or two, I just take a little break, a short walk around the beautiful gardens and grounds,” he said. “After lunch, I walk around the grounds for a while, and then I’m refreshed for the afternoon.”
Hulbert has his own technique for minimizing the pain and reducing the number of drips on his face and shoulders.
“I’m on a stool that turns and goes up and down,” he explained. “I lean backward, so if things drop and drip, they don’t fall in my face. Your arms are up all the time, but with those drips, you’re fighting gravity. By the end of the week, you’re just toast.”
Contrary to the legends, Hulbert said he’s certain that “Michelangelo did not lie on his back” to paint the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling in Vatican City.
“If you’re on your back, the paint drips on your face, in your mouth,” he explained. “Lying down, how can you dip your brush or see your palette?”
Much later, “when conservators worked on the chapel, they used the same scaffolding holes Michelangelo did. There’s no way he was lying down,” he said.
Besides, Hulbert added with a chuckle, “your arms would fall off” if you tried to do that much painting in such an awkward position.
Hulbert, a quiet man with a gentle sense of humor, has awe in his voice when he talks about his Hearst Castle commissions and experiences.
“It’s as a friend told me a long time ago — ‘Gary, you need to sometimes stop and smell the roses,’ ” he recalled. “It would be a shame to just work, work, work and not even go outside” to soak in the beauty, the setting and the views.
