Restoration of the William Perehudoff murals that were saved from the demolished Mitchell’s Gourmet Foods packing plant has entered its final phase, but organizers are still well short of the $125,000 needed to finish the project.
Art conservator Ian Hodkinson has offered to continue with the restoration despite the $70,000 shortfall as fundraising efforts gain a renewed urgency.
"We decided that this project should continue," said Dave Denny, the Saskatoon entrepreneur who initially spearheaded the effort to rescue the murals.
"We need to preserve the legacy of William Perehudoff and Fred Mendel. They’re two of our city’s most important figures."
Mendel, the meat-packing plant owner and art patron who founded the Mendel Art Gallery, commissioned the murals for the walls of the executive office during the 1950s when Perehudoff was a worker at the plant.
The group that co-ordinated the rescue of the murals began its fundraising drive in tandem with last Friday’s launch of the Perehudoff retrospective show at the Mendel Art Gallery.
Artist Henry van Seters created a limited set of hand-cut silkscreen prints of the murals, including a print of the bass player figure and one of the three musicians.
The 19"x26” prints can be purchased at the Mendel gift shop for $140 each. All proceeds will go toward the restoration of the murals.
Denny is hoping the people of Saskatoon will get behind their efforts by taking a little piece of the murals home with them.
Selling the prints would "raise the lion’s share of the funds," he said.
In the meantime Hodkinson is hard at work on the final stages of restoration, which involves transferring the images from canvas onto fibreglass panels.
It sounds simple, but the process is actually quite complex.
The technique Hodkinson is using has never been employed on acrylic paint.
"So Ian’s basically inventing methods," said Denny.
The canvases holding the images will be mounted on fibreglass panels, which then must be heated to melt the glue that holds the images to the canvas.
The temperature has to be exactly 75 C. If it gets too hot the paint could burn, or the glue could harden.
"When you’re doing work like this, which is a really major intervention, there’s always danger," said Hodkinson.
The canvas also must be perfectly flush with the panel or the image won’t come off correctly.
For this, Hodkinson devised a vacuum system to keep the canvas tightly pressed to the fibreglass.
Hodkinson hopes to have the restoration done by the middle of November, and he says he’s already putting in "crazy hours," beginning as early as 5:30 a.m.
The City of Saskatoon has provided an ideal workspace for the project at the city’s sign shop for the months of October and November.
It has plenty of open space, an industrial compressor and a well-ventilated spray room — a must when you’re working with so many different chemicals, says Hodkinson.
He seems in his element there — testing and calibrating his heating pads, preparing for the delicate work ahead as jazz music blares from the stereo.
You can hear Hodkinson’s passion for the project when he talks about time spent experimenting with different techniques during the past year, trying to see how acrylic paint would react to the heating process.
"I guess I’ve always been sort of intrigued by the combination of art and science, seeing how the materials respond."
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