Sometimes you don't know why you like something, right?

You just kind of spend time with it, and you, and you can't articulate it.

What is it that - I love this piece.

Why?

Sometimes I don't know why.

There's something just beautiful about it that's really engaging, and I can't always articulate it.

I think that happens to all of us.

This exhibition we're doing, we're doing actually a series called "Collection in Focus," where we're really pulling works out of our own collection into our side galleries, the Tower galleries.

"Modern European Currents," it's on view right now, has two works on paper, and those will cycle out.

The show goes for a while, and we can't show works on paper with watercolors for so long.

We need to change them out routinely.

I've known about this piece needing treatment for maybe 15, 16, 17 years, and it's always been on my list of something that needs to get done.

And this exhibition made it happen.

See how careful she was.

Really careful and deliberate.

Methodical.

A lot of times people are like, freaked out that conservators aren't wearing gloves, necessarily.

You can't be wearing some bulky glove.

You're going to do damage.

But if you have oils on your hands, which we all do, you're going to do another kind of damage.

So we wash our hands repeatedly and keep our hands clean.

And we're really careful how we use our hands on paper, because paper is just so fragile.

Whenever I look at a work on paper, I'm always like, what can I find that's hidden that might be interesting as a story?

And I can see down here in this animal's leg, this is graphite.

There's some lines there that's under the watercolor.

Very faint.

Just making out some lines here.

That's immediate trigger for me to say, "Oh, I bet you there's an underdrawing here."

And we could maybe, if we're lucky, we can reveal it through an infrared camera we have.

I'm going to use a flashlight and come in, what we call raking light.

And I can see this line here.

There was a fold in this paper, usually you don't fold up a watercolor, right.

Super fragile, but it looks like the folds predate the watercolor.

So I'm going to turn this around now and look at it from the back.

And looking at the back I can see, okay.

Now there's, now I can really see all these other folds.

So there's a line down here.

There's a line across here.

Then we have this diagonal and a line here.

And I was looking at this, and I was thinking about how this is a braid of like dirt.

We took a piece of paper and folded it up.

So we matched all these same folds because I thought, well, when I wrap a gift in a box, I get a little corner like this.

So this I think this was a wrapping paper for a box, much bigger, that was cut, opened up, cut down and then flattened.

And then he painted on top of that.

And you can see, very easily, you can see all this damage up here and loss.

This is, this is actually in much better shape than it was.

You're catching us during treatment or we'd say during treatment and pretty far along now.

So if you look at this image here much more loss up here.

Look, this is missing.

This is missing.

Lots of losses on the corners.

So what we've been doing is filling losses.

And we made paper.

Once those fills are put in we in-paint those fills to integrate with the rest of the surrounding.

We want it to look like nothing happened.

So part of our work in conservation is really to be invisible.

You don't want to see the hand of the conservator.

So I'm using watercolors here to retouch these areas where the paint has flaked off.

It's important for the hands to be steady, so I don't go over on to the original paint.

When you in-paint on on the surface of an artwork, that's called retouching.

When you in-paint on a fill that we've added that's called in-painting.

So retouching is really serious.

You don't do that lightly because you now you're, you're going directly on to a surface that the artist worked on, as opposed to a fill that we added.

Our fills can be removed easily.

They can be replaced.

They're reversible.

Retouching is not as reversible.

We're talking about fragile materials.

And the big thing we're worried about is light exposure.

Some colors fade, some don't.

When something fades, it doesn't come back.

So when it's on view, it's fading.

And then when you put it away, it doesn't rest.

People say "it rests."

It doesn't like regenerate and feel better.

It just stops.

And then you put it back on view, and it keeps fading again, and it never comes back.

And there is no treatment we can do to bring that back.

So part of caring for our collection is portioning that out.

The goal is to show this forever, to have it forever.

So how can we do that?

Most of a collection will be in storage.

It's, most of its life, it's going to live in storage.

Sometimes people think, well, this is an outrage that you have this collection, and it's not on view all the time.

But that's not sustainable to the collection.

It's part of our mission is to preserve that collection and storing it really carefully, making it available when we can.