I don’t think King Tutankhamun’s solid gold headdress is more valuable to you than your son or daughter’s winning first football jersey. But King Tut has all kinds of people, people with all kinds of initials behind their names, who are prone to all kinds of threats. These goodies include things like ultraviolet light, atmospheric evils, vile little creatures that crawl, crawl, and eat, and last but not least, bad people who would steal the king’s goodies.
If you don’t have fancy initials behind your name, don’t worry, neither do I, but I’ve taken it upon myself to talk to some of those people and read some really VERY difficult things these people wrote. Full of tables and graphs and Greek letters, for crying out loud! On more than one occasion I remembered too clearly my old chemistry and physics classes. I can’t say that I remembered anything about chemistry or physics, I just remembered being confused in particularly chemical and physical ways. Things like oxidation, the frequency and wavelengths of light, and other imponderables. But now I have some good and hopefully comprehensive tips to pass on to you.
LIGHT:
The first thing to know about light is that it is made of exactly the same stuff as X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, etc. and other deadly things. The only difference between the UV rays that are used to sterilize (kill bacteria on) things and the look of an “early morning softly-sprayed violet” is the frequency/wavelength of the light. It’s like the difference between a soprano’s voice (the dangerous, high-energy, destructive ultraviolet end of the spectrum) and a low voice (the IR ‘infrared’ end). This is the end of the spectrum that makes a nice crunch. such a cozy fire on a cold winter night. I am NOT drawing any inferences between the relative likeability of a squeaky little harpy and a big warm teddy bear of a man, but feel free to ponder for yourself.
The point here is that ANY radiation, even relatively benign things that our eyes recognize as visible light, will damage things. Take as a hypothetical example a priceless medieval tapestry. If, for whatever reason, you wanted to fade it to white and use it to make a nice bed for your dog, you’d do well to get what they call ‘ionizing radiation’. Easy to do, all you have to do is spread the tapestry facing the sun somewhere high above the earth’s magnetic field and outside its atmosphere. If you don’t have a spaceship at your disposal, you’re out of luck, but the rest of us are lucky. Our planet protects us from this ionizing radiation matter, and this is a very good thing. The right end of the spectrum, the highest soprano on the radiation scale, is deadly to living things, and not very nice to dead things, either. Anything more complicated than rock is broken down into its components in this ionizing radiation. Let me emphasize this. Ultraviolet light is part of what is called ionizing radiation and it breaks down organic matter. Examples of organic matter include most pigments. Your kids’ oil paints, watercolors, and crayons are made from organic pigments, and YOU are another example of organic matter. You’re certainly made of organic matter, unless you’ve had certain types of surgery. (Even silicone is organic, but preserving it is beyond my scope in this article.)
In fact, if you were somehow able to spread out your medieval tapestry in direct sunlight unfiltered into space, the sun’s rays would not only fade it, but turn it into nothing more than a puff of gas and a little of light. carbon ash fairly quickly.
But let’s go back to our example or deliberately fade a priceless tapestry. If you don’t have a spaceship, your next best option is to spread it out in the most convenient equatorial desert. Africa is full of such, but your backyard on a sunny day would do. If it’s a rainy day, your next best option is to spread it out under some very expensive special UV lamps that decorators and special effects use. Or you could use simple fluorescent lights. Not that fast, but eventually they’ll get the job done. No fluorescent lights you say? But you have a bunch of regular old light bulbs you want to use, what they call “incandescent bulbs”? Forget it. Incandescent lights do not give off enough UV light to reach didley. They do a good job in visible light and a good job in infrared light – the warm and cuddly end of the spectrum. Also, if you were to mistakenly place a clear plastic panel over the top of your tapestry, just to keep it flat, you would slow down the process even more. Plastic is opaque to UV radiation, you say? Yes, this is what I am saying. PLASTIC IS GREATLY OPAQUE TO UV LIGHT AND GLASS IS NOT! (But it will only slow down the process. You can NOT stop it completely.)
So for abstracts, if you can see it, there is visible light bouncing off it and your eyeballs. If light bounces off it, there must be light falling on it. And if light falls on it, there is some degradation, maybe very little and very slow, but there is degradation.
WHAT TO DO -at a low price.
All of this is to say that common sense will get you further down the road of UV protection than all the fancy expensive plastics, films and specialty bulbs. You MUST keep your collectible out of direct sunlight. You MUST keep it away from any bright light. If there are a lot of fluorescent lights in the room where you keep your collection, you COULD buy some tubes or plastic sleeves to cover the bulbs. But wait a minute, if your fluorescent bulbs are behind a plastic panel, maybe in recessed lights, you’re already there! Remember, plastic is opaque to UV light!
WHAT TO DO -spend money.
Let’s say you’ve done everything you can in the room where your valuables reside: plastic between the fluorescent bulbs and your artwork, acid-free mounting materials, things mounted to the walls so sunlight doesn’t fall on them. (and remember: the sun shines differently in winter than in summer (probably reaches further into your room than in summer), etc. But there is a window. It’s a good window, it lets in a nice light, maybe nice, cool even north light and some fresh air too you don’t want to board it up and you don’t even want curtains here’s what you do get a piece of acrylic plastic a little bigger than the window -say 20% bigger – and hang it from the ceiling with two chains. Put it 4-5 inches away from the wall and you can reach behind it to open and close the window to let fresh air in. You may have noticed such things in museums. People from the museum He calls them speakers. They limit UV rays and do so discreetly. Or use that reflective film they make to cut down on the summer heat. Both of these things are sold at your local home improvement store, but if you need a piece of acrylic larger than 24″ x 48″, you may need to open the phone book.
WHAT TO DO – spend a lot of money but do things right.
We have to agree that glass simply looks better than plastic. This is not to say that plastic does not have some definite advantages: it is lighter, stronger, and less dangerous, etc. -not to mention it’s opaque to UV rays, but it’s just not as easy on the eyes as glass. But glass is transparent to destructive ultraviolet radiation. There is a rather snooty company that makes all kinds of treated glass. The material is not cheap, but for valuable works of art, it is a must. It will cost you 3-5 times the cost of the glass you buy at your local home improvement store. (Cheer up, the stuff they make for museums costs 10 times as much.)
What makes it so worth it? Well, it’s covered in a special, proprietary plastic film that kills UV light. It is then acid etched just a little bit to reduce glare. It is then given another layer of secret matter to further kill the glow. It cuts like regular glass, but given the cost of museum or conservation glass, you might want to know what you’re doing with a glass cutter.* If you don’t, the good news is that there are all kinds of people who they know this and they know even more about this acid free and that archival quality. (And they can deal with the presumptuous company that makes the expensive glass.) Check out….
Professional Picture Framers Association
*A good glass cutter will cost you $5.00 at the hardware store and is not difficult to use, but it does have a trick. You can see if you can’t find someone to teach you, or buy a large sheet of glass and practice turning it into a bunch of smaller NEAT sheets.