We are on top of the bird cage scaffolding
that's been erected for the conservation cleaning project
in the Portrait Gallery.
The reason we've built this is obviously to clean the murals
in preparation for the building reopening
as part of the Portrait of the Nation project.
This space, this main hall where we are standing at the moment is a really special space
because actually if you took the whole collection out of the building
you'd still have a National Portrait Gallery, this space does it.
This takes you right the way from Stone-age man
right up to the end of the nineteenth century.
It's very much Scotland's Valhalla.
It's the great national celebration of Scottish identity
and aren't we lucky that it's so good?
Over the summer in 2009
we took the opportunity to cover up all the painted surfaces
to protect them during the building works.
That gave us the opportunity
of getting up there on a mobile scaffolding unit
looking at the murals and particularly the ceiling
and I couldn't resist a few sneaky cleaning tests
and it was really alarming.
Of course we're talking about almost a hundred and twenty years
of dirt accumulation in the Central Hall.
Well I'm cleaning one of the scenes,
it's the Battle of Bannockburn in fact.
I'm just cleaning the sky at the moment
and you can see it's quite dirty,
you've got the dirt on the swab there.
I'm just wiping it with a bit of water.
These are the least dirty parts of the mural in fact,
the dirtiest bits were the ceilings.
Well it's been a great team made up of students
from all different institutions both in the UK and abroad
and they've all been working in the heat,
uncomplaining and doing a great job.
Well we've initially gone over the ceiling once to clean it
and right now I'm going back and trying to even out any areas
that still have some residual grime.
Sometimes it's more difficult to clean around the stars
so I've been going back in those areas in particular
and just making sure that everything is clean
before we move on to the next area.
The scale is huge so it's quite easy just to concentrate on one little bit
and then forget everything else
and then you go down and you can't even notice any sort of difference
so you have to keep the whole sort of thing in mind.
It's going really well, yes,
we're in our fifth week and a week and a half to go
and we've covered quite a lot of the scheme already.
Some areas have been more difficult than others
but we've discovered quite a lot about how the artist has worked
and the condition of the paintings is really, really good
so that's something that we're discovering as we go along.
The man who painted the frieze and the frescoes
was a Scottish artist called William Hole.
He was based in Edinburgh.
He was still somebody who could actually paint great narrative pictures
in the sort of almost renaissance tradition
which of course died out really in the twentieth century
so we were lucky to get that sort of school of painting
before it had become outdated
and what he painted on our walls was I think are effective tapestries really.
To me almost the most exciting thing is the frieze
and how the gold has come up
and also how you actually see with the sort of raking light
it almost sparkling because the gold is painted on a sort of rough gesso background
and of course that catches the light and that makes it sparkle
and I just think that looks wonderful.
It's a remarkable feat for one man to have achieved this
and, of course, the condition of William Hole's original work
is truly remarkable.
You can see so many details when you're working close to it.
You see how the artist made the paintings,
the little changes he's made
and actually you can admire him technically
because when you look at the paintings from a distance it all reads as a whole
but when you see it close to you see the different ways he's executed the painting
and that's been fascinating.
We've actually got quite an interesting area in this arrow.
I don't know if you can see some pencil marks there
and we've got the point there as well.
The artist decided to change that at some point and flip it round
so he either tinkered with the idea that he wants the arrow pointing that way or that way
so that's a really important process of what we're doing,
documenting everything we see and everything we do,
not just for our own records and the Gallery's records but for future records as well
so things like this will be documented
and also the actual treatments we're using and the effects of that.
It's really just a comprehensive record
documenting absolutely everything that goes on.
It's been a really great project,
besides the work itself I think one of the great things has been
being a part of this large and international student group
and of being able to learn from one another as well
so that's been I think a really good experience for me.
Maybe my favourite part has been the ability to get so close
to different parts of the wall
and see all the detail involved in the paintings
and the large scale of these projects is definitely something different.
It's been really exciting.
It's the kind of big project that only happens now and again
and we've all been lucky to be involved in such a thing
so it's been really satisfying
and I think we can all be proud of doing a descent job hopefully at the end of it
so, yeah, I look forward to that.
For those visitors coming into the building
I hope that their eye is drawn upward
and they might think to themselves
'gosh, I don't remember this being here'
or it certainly, I hope, will give this part of the building
a new lease of life.