Leading paper conservators from across the United States are on campus through Friday, August 6, attending a comprehensive pastel workshop.

Hosted by the Art Conservation Department for the American Institute for Conservation, the workshop will focus on the history, materials, techniques, and tools of pastel painting, an artistic phenomenon that blossomed in Western Europe beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century. Participants will gain hands-on experience, learning traditional pastel painting techniques by fabricating their own pastels from dry powdered pigments and creating their own pastel painting.

Judith Walsh, professor of paper conservation, is the faculty host for the group which includes participants from The Menil Collection; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Yale Center for British Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Cleveland Museum of Art; as well as several conservators in private practice.

Instruction is provided by world renowned pastel painting expert Thea Burns. Burns is an independent scholar from Kingston, Ontario. She was formerly the Helen H. Glaser Senior Paper Conservator for Special Collections at the Harvard College Library, and is also the author of The Invention of Pastel Painting (Archetype, 2007). She is the author of numerous articles in conservation and art history journals.