Cleaning acrylic paintings

Meenakshi Devi <meenakshi2258 [at] yahoo__co__in> writes

>I am a paintings conservator in India. These days I am working on an
>acrylic painting where I am facing a problem in cleaning. The
>painting is about 50 years old and has an accumulation of dust and
>dirt hiding the details of the painting. Any solvent, aqueous or
>organic, takes out the colour. Could any one recommend some method
>or material with which they have had success?

You could try saliva on cotton buds or dry cleaning pads or dry
cleaning powder that you should rub gently on the surface. In the
Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Turin, Italy, we also used tiny
pieces of very soft bread eraser, approximately 0.5 cm in diametre
which we rubbed on very fragile painted surfaces. It worked pretty
well.

Evangelia Kyriazi
BA Hons Conservation and Restoration
Valaoritou 12, Mytilene 81100, Greece


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 19:4
                  Distributed: Wednesday, July 6, 2005
                        Message Id: cdl-19-4-010
                                  ***