Below are the hyperlinks to all of the articles on Ezinearticles.com

Museum Quality China Repair:
http://ezinearticles.com/?China-Repair:-The-Museum-Quality-Method&id=6127835

Porcelain Plate Restoration:
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Art-of-Porcelain-Restoration&id=1721132

Meissen Figurine Repair:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Meissen-Porcelain-Repair&id=2257030

Doll Collection and Repair:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Collecting-and-Repairing-Dolls&id=3058895

Restoration of Chinese Porcelain:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Chinese-Porcelain-Across-Cultures&id=2466151

China Set Repair:
http://ezinearticles.com/?China-Repair-For-Grandmothers-China-Set&id=1578066

China Restoration in History

The art and craft of Chinese porcelain has played a crucial role in bringing the artistry of porcelain to different parts of the world, as well as to different and often seemingly unrelated disciplines  (architecture, sculpture, silverwork, etc.) It set forth a novel and creative multi-cultural synthesis that has helped the way the world looks at a work of art.

According to Luba Sokolina, a porcelain repair expert at Luel Restoration Studio and a student of Asian culture and art, “Around the same time Europe was going through a “porcelain craze”, Islamic cultures of Egypt and Turkey were too greatly influenced by the art of Chinese porcelain makers. “ Doing research on the impact of Chinese porcelain on Islamic art and craft, Luba noticed that It is precisely in the treatment of surface that China exerted her most powerful impact on Islamic concepts of ceramic decoration. Prior to the fifteenth century, the Chinese working in blue and white had been content to accept the two dimensionality of Islamic design, with its decorations capable of infinite extension into space and so filling it.

But once the mathematical division of space which was a concommitant of this approach had been mastered, the Chinese adapted the fundamental need for division of surface to their own ends, and reverted to their own deeply-ingrained habit of using space in such a manner as to imply a third dimension. They achieved this by using decorative elements which could stand independently of each other and yet were spatially related on the surface. The impact was not confined to Iran, but is seen in Egypt, in the work of Gaibi and his contemporaries, in Syria, and in the Iznik wares of Turkey. Ultimately the same impact, in a slightly different context was made on Europe.

The actual elements constituting the Chinese porcelain style have now become so deeply imbedded in the traditions of both the Near East and Europe that it is not easy to recognize them, but once seen and their origins understood, they become as obvious as those of the Near East in Chinese traditions.

Luba Sokolina is the head restorer of Luel Restoration Studio, specializing in ceramic and porcelain repair. Visit Luel Restoration Studio at http://www.luelstudio.com

If your grandmother is throwing out a chipped piece of china stored for years in her china hutch, ask her, beg her, to let you take the piece.  With proper china restoration from an experienced and talented restoration artist, the platter can be a beautiful piece for displaying on a prominent shelf or in your own china hutch.

There are a few artists, such as Luba Sokolina, who specialize in china repair and porcelain restoration.  The techniques she uses are amazing resulting in invisible repair lines and museum quality restoration.

It should be noted that these repairs do not usually allow the owners to use the plates for meals. They are used for display/decorative purposes only. 

Perhaps that china platter was a gift from grandmother’s wedding so many years ago or it was the one bit of luxury she cherished, but knowing the history can make the piece so much more meaningful.  Having a professional restoration is definitely recommended for exceptional results.

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But the story is complicated by the girl falling in love with Chang, the father’s clerk. The girl and young man eloped across the sea to the island cottages.  The father followed them and caught them.  He was about to have them killed when the gods saved the two by transforming them into a pair of turtle doves.  These are seen flying together at the top of the design.

The Blue Willow present form was originally designed in the United Kingdom in 1790 Caughley Pottery Works in Shropshire.

China, originally referred to a ceramic dinnerware coming out of the country of China, was particularly fine and exceptionally white.

China is a ceramic product but of a very fine quality and it should more accurately be called porcelain. The Chinese perfected porcelain by using kaolin, a white clay, mixing it with china stone and firing it at high temperatures. That was in the 10th century and it took another 800 years before true porcelain was developed in Europe.

Early Europeans tried to duplicate Chinese porcelain and the results were soft paste porcelain made with clays and silicates. In the 1700s, a German pottery company successfully produced bone china, which is similar to true porcelain, by mixing calcified bones, clay, and feldspar. Bone china is extremely strong and easy to make, and it became very popular among the English speaking nations. However, true porcelain is preferred in much of Europe and Asia.

True porcelain is a hard, fine-grained, sonorous, nonporous, and usually translucent and white ceramic ware that consists essentially of kaolin, quartz, and a feldspathic rock and is fired at a high temperature —called also hard-paste porcelain.

In China, porcelain is defined as pottery that is resonant when struck; in the West it is a material that is translucent when held to the light. Neither definition is totally correct. Some heavily potted porcelains are opaque, while some thinly potted stonewares are sometimes translucent.

Porcelain Repair 

The trick in porcelain repair (china repair) is to be able to match the surface texture in such a way that it doesn’t differ from the original when held up to the light or gently struck. Airbrushing and glazing are two of the most important step in restoring china (or true porcelain), soft-paste porcelain and bone china. Glaze, a glass-like substance originally used to seal a porous pottery body is used solely for decoration on true(hard-paste) porcelain. A lot of inexperienced china restorers use too much glaze to cover their sculpting mistakes, thereby rendering the restored part more opaque than what it was originally.

Airbrushing the matched and replicated design in cold restoration requires painstaking effort. Painted decorations are executed over the fired glaze. Because painting under the glaze must be fired at the same high temperatures as the body, many colors and designs would get distorted or simply “fire away”. That’s why underglaze painting is limited to the extremely stable and reliable cobalt blue, which is found in most Chinese blue-and-white wares. These days most porcelain colors and designs are painted over the glaze and they are not as vivid and precise as the underglaze designs; therefore a restorer involved in porcelain repair and restoration is required to be very precise and patient.

For more on china restoration and porcelain repair, and to see the before and after photos of the two-inch Ming Dynasty wine cup Luba just restored for a New York City collector, click here…

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A subject close to our hearts is of course, porcelain, and “A Cup of Light,” is a great novel written around the topic of the intricacies of Chinese porcelain and the world of imitators and smugglers. It’s not a new book, published in 2003, but you may know the author, Nicole Mones, by her first book, “Lost in Translation,” which was made into the movie of the same name.

This is a fictional tale of a specialist in Chinese porcelain for a Sotheby’s-like art dealer who flies to Beijing to appraise a treasure trove of imperial porcelain pots secretly offered for sale by a Chinese businessman.

It’s an interesting read with so much Chinese porcelain art history being such a huge part of the story with the author’s detailed descriptions of the process and the history of Chinese porcelain.

If you are interested in the modern art world or porcelain art history, this is a good read.

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