Making Mural Vanish - High School Panel Gets New Location

The Orange County Register - December 12, 1991

By Kinney Littlefield

Nathan Zakheim is a miracle worker. Just ask him. "My specialty is doing the impossible, he explains. "That's why I'm called in after everyone else has given up. "Part exorcist, part alchemist, he routinely gives endangered, historically important murals new life by repairing their pigment skins or banishing the evil grime and moisture infiltrating their inner core, and on occasion he has been known to make the dead walk - or at least he makes hopelessly crumbling wall paintings vanish from one location and miraculously reappear - intact and healthy - in another. Right now Zakheim is performing miracles in Laguna Beach, where he is slowly making a painted mural disappear from three walls of Laguna Beach High School's cafeteria. Some time next year the same mural will reappear, thanks to Zakheim's wizardry, on the walls of the school's newly renovated theatre. And it will look just as it did in its former home - or even better, Zakheim promises. "LBHS Cafeteria Mural" is a life-size scene of students in the attire of typical sport and extracurricular activities, from band to baseball. It was overlooked when plans were drawn for the upcoming high school renovation, and until recently it was slated for destruction. But the gray acrylic mural holds a special significance for LBHS students, faculty and parents, earning it a reprieve. It was painted in 1984 by Megan Hart Jones, an LBHS student and talented young artist who died of a rare cancer in 1987 at the age of 20. Megan's mother organized a community fund-raising committee to save the mural and found Zakheim to figure out how to transplant it. "It 's just like California Falling into the ocean," says Zakheim, who relishes turning conservation into high drama, as he fingers the nine layers of plaster over which Megan painted her mural. "If we just tried to pry the painting off the wall, plaster and all, the whole things would disintegrate," So Zakheim slowly has been working his magic on Megan's mural, staring in July with careful removal of surface grime and grease. Thirty layers of special acrylic resin wee sprayed over the image, consolidating its paint into a kind of non-soluble plastic film. After every five layers, Zakheim gave the painting a week's rest. Then Zakheim and his partner, Nina Mathews Mudakotil, hand applied a sacrificial coating of easily removable clear plastic and waited for that to dry. Now the mural looks as if it's readied for some strange mystical ritual.Each figure is swathed, mummy like, in white non-woven fabric. During the next two weeks, the fabric will support the painting from the front when Zakheim gently vibrates it off the wall with the small, short strokes of a compressed air pistol, working up from the bottom of the image. By February, Megan Jones' mural will have a whole new life on an achivally sound fiberglass skeleton and will be awaiting installation in the new theatre sometime in 1992. Zakheim calls all this technical conjuring "strappo," after Italian techniques of fresco removal. It's a painstaking process that he devised in 1996, when he saved he deteriorating murals of his famous painter-father, Bernard Zakheim. Those murals decorated the walls of the University of California Medical Center in Sa n Francisco. An expert from University of California, Davis, deemed removal of the murals impossible, so Zakheim had hired an engineer to forcibly tear the entire wall on which they were painted. But after having a vivid, and inspired, nightmare of potential artistic disaster, Zakheim fired the engineer and decided to try tripping the murals off the wall from the front with resin similar to the one he uses today. It worked. Zakheim's Culver City firm has removed nearly 20 murals, sometimes literally using a nut-and-bolt approach, as well as tons of steel reinforcement; odd, sticky acrylic substances; and lots of ghostly white fabric - all to the tune of thousands of dollars. Perhaps Zakheim's most amazing feat of legerdemain was the removal of two 12-foot-high Howard Warshaw and Channing Peake murals from the walls of the downtown Santa Barbara public Library in 1977-78. Although Zakheim has restored the world famous "Prometheus" fresco by Jose Clemente Orozco at Pomona College, as well other famous historical works by Charles M. Russell, Diego Rivera, Rico Lebrun and his own father, he remains most concerned about the fate of poorly planned contemporary murals. Zakheim is working with Los Angeles artist Frank Romero, making sure his new CalTrans mural is properly prepared. "Our contribution," Zakheim says, "is making sure murals painted today last not five years or 10 years but 50 or 100 years. If treated properly, the prognosis should be for a very long life."
Laguna Beach News - August 29, 2991
Preserving art restore Removal of murals begins at high school
By August Millet

Removal of Megan Hart Jones' series of murals, "Shadows of the Past," has begun in the Laguna Beach High School cafeteria. The man chosen to perform the delicate work of removing the murals is Nathan Zakheim. An art conservator, Zakheim's list of credits includes the Diego Rivera mural at L.A. City College and Kent Twitchell freeway mural in Los Angeles. The Laguna Beach Unified school board has advanced $7,500 to community mural preservation fund which has now surpassed the $16,000 mark. The price tag for Zakheim's work is 30,000. Working with his 10-year-old son Kuva, already an experienced assistant in art restoration, Zakheim spent Thursday preparing the walls for his Strappo removal process, an ancient technique that he has adapted to acrylic murals. "This is such an important day for me. It is, in fact, beginning," said Chadlyn Jones, mother of the deceased muralist, as she watched Zakheim get started. Megan Hart Jones painted the murals when she was 17 years old in the early 1980s, while student at Laguna Beach High School. She died of cancer at age 20. The project took more than 300 hours to complete. The complete work included 15 human figures, students in various activities that reflect the academic life at the high school. The murals to be restored one at a time.Very complex, the Strappo process requires more than a dozen chemicals in all. The critical stage involves impregnating solvents into the seven layers of enamel wall paint that lie under the murals, eventually loosening the layers so that the murals can be peeled off the wall unaltered. The figures will then be mounted on a special fiberglass backing. "What we'll have are paper dolls. Once the figures are cut out, we can lay them on different colors to decide the best background for them," Zakheim said. Working with a two-to four-man crew, Zakheim estimates removal of all 14 figures will take about one month. But contrary to a popular misconception, the murals will not be taken to Los Angelis for storage. "We can do this all right in the cafeteria," said Zakheim.

The Coastline news - July 12, 1991
Festival of Arts Foundation Offers $5,000 to Jones Mural Preservation Fund
By David Wilson

Noted Los Angeles art conservator Nathan Zakheim has estimated that life-size portraits of students can be removed from the wall and reapplied to stretched canvas under $30,000."We don't want to loose Nathan Zakheim," Jones said. "He has large projects to do. We want to get him while he's here and students are away." Zakheim has reportedly agreed to begin the preservation process for a reduced up-front payment of $7,500, or about one quarter of the total coast. "We need to get lots of contributions to prove our creditability," said Jones. The artist's mother hinted that the committee might ask the School Board to front Zakheim's retainer, and then repay it as more cash donations come in.

Coast Line - May 15, 1992
Conservator Unveils First Safely Transferred Mural
By David Wilson

Los Angeles art conservator Nathan Zakheim, whose skills were called upon to preserve the endangered murals painted on the wall of the high school cafeteria by gifted young artist Megan Hart Jones, showed the results of the first complete transfer to the Board of Education Tuesday. The response was unquestionably positive. While many have praised Zakheim's skill at the finicky process of peeling painted images from the plaster or concrete substrates on which they were painted, Zakheim himself gave credit to school district leaders. "This could not have been done without the visionary participation of [school district superintendent] Dr. Paul Possemato and [district business manager] Dr. Terry Bustillos," the conservator told the group. "I have never had a more easily achieved success."Zakheim used a combination of chemical solvents, temporary fixatives, and vibration to remove the murals from the cafeteria walls on which they had been painted by Jones. The figures are those of classmates at LBHS in the mid-1980s. At his workshop, Zakheim prepared a four-by-seven sheet of mahogany, stiffened it with a wood frame and ribs, sealed it, covered it with a non-woven cloth, painted it, and then reapplied the image to the new backing. It is difficult to realize the thinness of the image with which Zakheim worked. "There were nine layers of paint," he said. "We took off seven and a half of them." Zakheim guessed he had about 15 hours in the reattachment process, and said the remaining 14 portraits could be handled in the next three to four weeks. The engaging conservator, who seemingly misses no opportunity to make light of his occupation, said of the year that had passed since the project began, "I could have done it in three days, but then it would have seems expensive." Citizens and organizations have contributed nearly $30,000 to cover Zakheim's reduced price for the mural conservation work. Zakheim was accompanied by his son Narottam (pronounced Narr-Tom), who he introduced as "the heir to Nathan Zakheim Associates when I pass on to that great scaffolding in the sky." After the presentation Zakheim discussed final details of the restoration such as background tinting and surface texture. Megan Jones' mother Chadlyn, was delighted with the preservation of a mural she had once feared would be destroyed.

Laguna beach News - February 6, 1992
Mural Removal to be Completed Next Week
By Anita Bahl

Nathan Zakheim, an art conservator based in Los Angeles, last fall was hired to preserve the project with the help of three assistants. After the figures are removed, Zakheim anticipates considerable more man hours will be invested in mounting and retracing them onto canvases in Los Angeles. But he said he expects to stay within budget on the project. The end product, to be completed before summer, will be paper thin, he added. "Each step isn't complicated, but put together, it's a sophisticated system," said Zakheim, who specializes in transferring murals with macro-adjustable impact hammer.

Coast Line - January 31, 1992
Conservator begins Mural removal at High School
By David Wilson

Los Angeles art conservator Nathan Zakheim brought his compressor and hammer to the Laguna Beach High School last week, and in a process of controlled violence deftly began peeling images from the cafeteria walls intact even as he reduced the plaster beneath them to dust and rubble. Monday afternoon Zakheim peeled off two of thee life-size figures painted on the wall in the mid-1980s by high school student Megan Hart Jones. The Saturday before, he had removed four others and transported them to his workshop in Los Angeles. There the portraits will be reattached with a heat-and-vacuum process to a stretched canvas. Thus fixed and framed on a movable surface, the portraits can eventually be displayed elsewhere on the remodeled high school campus. The engaging Zakheim, keeping up a chatty "I'm-glad-this-is-working-out" line of patter with school district administrators and press representatives who were watching the process, took about 20 minutes to cut the outline of a figure and pulverize the plaster beneath it with a micro-adjustable air hammer. Dust filled the room and the portrait's edges peeled away from the wall as pounds of broken plaster fell from behind it and accumulated on the floor.Finally, with the help of artist's mother Chadlyn Jones and his assistant Nina Mathews, Zakheim separated the portrait from its last connections to the wall. Charring it like an oversized cut-out, the trio laid it carefully on a cafeteria table, where he and Mathews began chipping away the crumbs of plaster that still adhered to the back of the silhouette. Zakheim's casual put a low-key quality on a moment that was actually the climax of a process that began over a year ago...