The Conservator and the Painter
A museum conservator answers to the historical object as it exists today. The job is to stabilize what has survived.
A painter whose interest is purely color asks a different question: what did the artist intend, and how did they make the palette choices that turned the picture into a masterpiece? The better we understand that, the closer we come to the original creation and to an image worth cherishing.
The aim is not to preserve how the painting looks now. It is to come as close as we can to how it looked, still wet on the easel, before time began its quiet erosion. No one can know that for certain, so every restoration here is an interpretation. We are not serving the history of the object. We are serving the eye of the painter.
Every image is brought back to life
after it has been re-interpreted in
an abstract painting focusing
solely on color harmonies.
Juxtapositions are the palette.
A palette isn't a list of tubes. The same colors can make a hundred different paintings; what decides is which color sits against which. The energy of a painting is born at the edge, where one color ends and the next begins.
That is what the homage painting is for. On a 12×12 inch ABS board, wet on wet, I rebuild a master's juxtapositions with my own hands: not his figures, only the tension between his colors. What I learn at the easel goes back into the second restoration.
— Roberto Azank
What hand retouching fixes.
The damage in an old painting is rarely the painter's hand. In Las Meninas, a seam in the canvas runs the full height of the picture, straight through Velázquez's face. I retouched it by hand, pixel by pixel; the film shows about four minutes of that work, sped up. Only the canvas damage is repaired. The brushwork stays.
How each piece is made.
Source
A public-domain scan at the highest resolution available — usually a museum's own open-access file.
First restoration
Grime and aged varnish lifted from the entire painting at once, in Apple Photos and Adobe Photoshop. No automatic controls. No hue isolated, no region masked or relit. No AI. I push the color only until a blue becomes a true blue and lead white turns silver. One step further and it's artificial saturation, so I stop there. I work by hand until the colors fully separate, clean of varnish and of anything else that flattens the spectrum. This first restoration is the model for the homage.
The Wavefield Homage
Using the first restoration as my model, I paint each palette by hand as an abstract Wavefield Homage, focusing on the juxtapositions: which color sits against which. Hours inside its color and its light.
Second restoration
Then the roles reverse. I make a second restoration with the painting as my model. I trust the painting, even when the colors come out wilder than in my first restoration. That is the Unvarnished version.
Surface restoration
Cracks, flaking, and lifted paint, including saponification (the soap-like blooms of aged oil paint), are repaired pixel by pixel, never by blurring or smoothing over the surrounding brushwork. How far I go is a judgment call, painting by painting. When a crack only gets in the way, it goes. Where a painting needs its age, I soften the cracks instead of removing them, because a surface with no age at all looks like plastic. My test: do you see the painting, or do you see the crack? These are corrections no physical conservator could attempt without altering the painting itself. This is the longest part of the work.
Archival pigment on Enhanced Matte Art Paper or Poster Stock, up to the size of the original canvas. Reproductions are cropped to the painted field — where a canvas has bare margins, those are excluded rather than filled.
Roberto sources most of his base files from Wikimedia Commons, an extraordinary archive of high-resolution scans from the institutions that house and protect these paintings. Keeping them safe means climate-controlled storage and, often, removal from public view — the risk of further decay or vandalism is too high to keep them on permanent display. The originals themselves can never be restored to the colors their painters chose centuries ago without damaging them further; their pigments are already unstable, worn by soot, humidity, poor handling, theft, and unfortunate restoration attempts that didn't always help. A digital restoration guided by a living color master is a different process entirely — no harm can come to the original.
But this isn't a filter. Roberto's process means living inside the work long enough to understand the painter's color intent — the human judgment no algorithm can replace. It isn't purely mechanical, chemical, or analytical, though it draws on all three. Guessing at the coloristic intent of an artist long gone is daring, complicated, exciting — it's interpretation, not mere restoration, and it goes places restoration alone never could dream to go.
The easel informs the pixel, and the pixel informs the brush.
I restore every painting twice — and paint it once, in between. By the time I come back to the file, I'm not the same viewer: the second restoration is what I now know the painting to be, having made it with my own hands.
This is a slow, hand process.
Every painting here is restored twice and painted once, in between — that's real hours, not a filter. Unvarnished isn't grant-funded; it runs on print sales and on people who back it directly. If the process is worth something to you, please consider sponsoring the next Restoration.
Every Old Master you have seen is wearing centuries of varnish. These are the paintings with it taken off.
Unvarnished.
Browse the collectionFree Download Offer
Pick any painting in the catalog and we'll send it free — sized and sharpened for a phone, a tablet or a desktop. Wake your screen up to a Masterpiece of your favorite artist in colors closer to the ones he mixed.