Memories Refresh

Consider them the fixers, but in a nonthreatening way. From giving new life to furniture pieces to painstakingly restoring artwork to repairing bikes through purpose-driven work, these local women are making the old new again.

LISA STRAZZA restores artwork, and oftentimes family memories, one paint stroke at a time.

Strazza, who operates Strazza Art Restoration out of her home studio in Southport, has spent twenty-five years in the field of art restoration and art conservation – the difference being that conservation work focuses more on preserving pieces and comes with tighter, museum-level restrictions on what to change, while restorations aim to update pieces to their original appearances.

Strazza, who studied abstract art in college, started learning about restoration while working at a gallery that did art restoration and high-end framing.

“Because I was an artist, and I’ve always had a very good sense of color … and that’s a large part of restoring paintings,” she says about the learning process. “I had to learn a lot about traditional oil painting techniques and a lot about chemicals, solvents, and different varnishes.”

That included research about the difference in materials between regions and time periods. “I had to learn what was used and how to clean it, how to reverse the different varnishes, and what colors and pigments were used at different time periods,” Strazza says.

Earlier in her career, she worked with a company that specialized in church restoration.

“I really did a lot of work up on scaffolding,” she recalls. “I apprenticed with other craftsmen and conservators, and that’s where I learned a lot of old-school techniques, and I worked on some pretty significant paintings in churches in New York and New Jersey.”

In New York, Strazza worked on her own abstract paintings. After moving to North Carolina, she incorporated Southern Impressionism into her pieces, which are sold in area galleries.

Her restoration work today largely focuses on clients’ personal pieces, which she takes on by appointment only through strazzagallery.com or artdoctors@strazzagallery.com.

Each project is different and can take from weeks to three months to work through the detailed cleanings and updates.

“I work on some things that are just sentimental value, that somebody’s grandmother did, or something that’s a significant listed artist,” she says.
Many of her projects restore family memories along with the paintings themselves.

For example, one was a life-sized family portrait of a young woman that probably dated back to the early 1800s.

“But it was so dark, you could hardly see what it was,” Strazza says. “It cleaned up so dramatically, that when it was all finished, we discovered that there was a rug and a brooch in the painting that she was wearing, and that family still owned those.”

Strazza’s husband also works out of the studio to restore memories – but on the photographic side. Photographer JOHN STRAZZA brings damaged and aged family photos back to life digitally.

“It’s so nice to bring something back to life really,” Lisa Strazza says, “and it gives such excitement and happiness to the owners. It’s really satisfying work.”

-Vicky Janowski