I met up with my dear friend Wagner Sangeli this week. He and I studied at The London College of Furniture and then were apprenticed at Titian Studios together. I can't believe we started our professional lives 13 years ago. Wagner is as handsome today as he was then, he doesn't look any older. I think he's not just a fabulous restorer of furniture, but he's somehow learnt how to preserve himself perfectly too. Perhaps he sleeps in a vat of restorative chemicals every night!
We were reminiscing about our days as apprentices. Titian's is justifiably famous for offering traditional old fashioned training. I loved studying Restoration and Conservation, and learned a great deal in academia, but I owe Rosaria Titian a debt of gratitude for everything she taught me on the bench. There truly is nothing like working alongside a great artist. Rosaria showed me how to understand colour, she helped me develop my eye, I began to feel my way into antiques through being with her. I think most of what I learned with her can't be described very well. There isn't a language to explain why I now know when is the right time to burnish gold, why I know a tiny bit of yellow in a white wash will make my work invisible, how I know that the shape of a leaf should be "just so". To FEEL your way into a trade like Restoration, you have to work alongside people who have that feel themselves. Somehow, unconsciously you begin to absorb the knowledge from that person. It is an extraordinary process and one that I will always be grateful for.
I remember especially enjoying watching Rosaria mix colour. It was so easy for her. We had a huge stack of mixing plates at Titians and they were always completely covered in swathes of paint as for me (and the other apprentices) it was usually very hard to match colour. The ever-changing tones of antique furniture are not easy to copy! When Rosaria mixed paint she'd look at a piece, choose a few tubes of oils, take a tiny daub of green, a slight touch of grey, flick her brush around on her plate, and she'd be ready to touch in. She said to me one day rather simply, "I know paint". And it was true. Watching her work like that, I learnt how to do it myself, and 13 years on, it's as easy for me as it was then for her. Could I have learnt that any other way than to have watched her do it? I doubt it. I hope that the apprentice system is never lost. It's so important that knowledge is passed on through observation. I think that's really the only way to fully grasp the many skills that restorers need.
