Restoration is the best school ever for an artist who prioritizes aesthetics before anything else. You temporarily possess the actual piece of art that survived many generations that otherwise could only be seen in a museum. But here you can live with it, touch it, study it, then try to imitate its shape, color, and texture little by little approaching perfection. That process includes everything… If you want to carve a missing hand of a statue it’s not enough to just know anatomy and how to use tools. You need to immerse yourself in a certain epoch to understand the stylistic aspects of those days, how the sculptor thought, what kind of tools and processes he used. It is a deep plunge into art history besides everything else.
This is a hard pass, and this is poetry.
