The in-house oil painting conservator at The Woodshed Gallery is Bruce Wood, who has been repairing and cleaning oil and acrylic paintings privately for over twenty-five years.

Bruce Wood is a member of the International Institute of Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and has fine art degrees from Massachusetts College of Art (BFA) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA).

After graduating, he worked for the Art History Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He befriended the museum’s conservators and was introduced to current approaches to the conservation and restoration of paintings and prints.

Upon leaving the Art History Department, he sought an apprenticeship in painting restoration. With none available, he accepted a one-year apprenticeship in color transparency retouching at Spectrum Studio in Chicago, where he learned the discipline of exact color matching and invisible image alteration.

Eventually, Bruce opened his own photo retouching studio in Chicago, with accounts including Keebler, Quaker Oats, McDonalds, Jim Beam, Coors and Helene Curtis.

With the advent of computerized photo alteration, he returned to his original goal of being a painting conservator. For seventeen years he operated the Fenway Galleries in Chicago and Michigan, selling contemporary art and restoring historical paintings.

An oil painter himself, Bruce has studied antique painting techniques, and collected nineteenth and early twentieth century oil paintings. He has restored them and sold them at antique and fine art auctions across the country, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctioneers.

Bruce Wood’s OIL PAINTING RESTORATION BLOG