My First Job in Art Conservation

I set an alarm that night.
Maybe you’ve never had to — because the thrill of your first job wakes you up on its own. But I did.
I had just finished art high school, and in the morning I was starting work at the Art Conservation Studio.

It felt like stepping into something serious — something real.

My first assignment brought me to my knees.
A giant painting—several meters wide and over ten meters long—was rolled up on a wooden cylinder.
As we slowly unrolled it, we had to reconstruct every missing piece of the paint layer.

There wasn’t a table big enough for it, so we painted on our knees, directly on the floor.

Later came polychrome sculptures, and eventually carving missing wooden parts—giving wings back to angels, or hands to crucified Christs.

I learned a lot from my more experienced colleagues.
That job changed something in me.
It was something new—and yet very old.
Old like the monuments themselves.
Old like art conservation, really.

Art school gave me the basics. Basics of reconstruction, drawing, sculpture, painting techniques. Some basic art history. But this? This was working on the living body of real artworks.

Life in an Art Conservation Studio

Life in an art conservation studio is different—because it’s a six-hour workday.

A conservator’s day lasted only six hours instead of eight—because of all the chemicals in the air. You breathe them in, whether you want to or not.

I’d leave the old town, the day still ahead of me, and ask: So what now?

One morning, between coffee and tea, I heard about a private school that taught Old Master techniques. After work, I went there on foot. It was a short walk.

That’s where I met Tadeusz Piotrowski—smiling, full of energy, with a beard and long hair. He spoke with such passion and charisma that you instantly wanted to start working.

No fluff. No theory-only lectures. He just threw you straight into practice.

I was completely immersed in the world of the Old Masters while preparing for my entrance exams to the → Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
And it hit me: before, I studied to get grades. Now I was learning for myself.

Either I’d use that time or I’d let it slip through my fingers.

Art school taught me the basics of drawing, painting, and sculpture. But here, at work, every day was a test—let’s see what you can really do.

What I once saw behind museum glass was now in front of me—waiting to be restored, rebuilt, or even brought back to life.

And that’s when everything started to connect.

After working with those old artworks, I could walk into → Tadeusz Piotrowski’s school and practice the very same techniques. The masters who created their works centuries ago had left behind recipes—and we used them in class.

I saw with my own eyes the same grounds, the same gesso, pigments, paints, glazes, and varnishes.
I learned how to sun-thicken linseed oil.
I understood why it’s worth making your own paints from hand-ground minerals.
What an oil glaze is. Why we use it.
I saw what had stood the test of time—and what hadn’t.
I saw the mistakes you can make before even reaching for a brush. What to do to make the ground actually stick to the canvas.
Centuries have already proven the durability of these methods.

My studies marked the end of my time in the art conservation studio.
Tadeusz is no longer with us.
I didn’t realize then how important that time was to me—how much I owe to my master.

If someone had told me back then that today I’d be crawling through caves in search of minerals, scooping magnetite from the sea, or walking with geologists through old mines and gravel pits… That I’d be planning a trip to Australia in search of ochres—
I’d have said they’d lost their mind.