by Cameron Walker | Dec 7, 2016 | Buzz, December 2016 / January 2017
Name: Noelle Ocon
Title: Conservator of Paintings
Company: North Carolina Museum of Art
Noelle Ocon does invisible work. As Conservator of Paintings at the North Carolina Museum of Art, she is tasked behind the scenes with caring for the collection’s paintings—an art defender, protecting priceless works from age, pests and the occasional handsy tourist.
The New Orleans native initially didn’t want to go to college, but she made a deal with her mom that she would try UNC-Chapel Hill for just one year. She ended up graduating from the university and chose to major in art history.
“At the end of my sophomore year, I went to a meeting for careers for art history majors,” says Ocon. “As I like to joke, it was a very short meeting, but I met a woman there who was a conservator. I had a ‘eureka’ moment; it was like a calling. From that point on, I had this path.”
After graduation, she worked for a private conservator in Maryland, and in 1996, earned her master’s degree from the State University College of Buffalo. The following year, when Ocon was hunting for a job, the only open position in her field was at the North Carolina Museum of Art, a happy coincidence. She’ll be celebrating 20 years at the museum this coming March.
Can you describe your job for us?
When we get a piece of art, I first want to make sure that it’s preserved, meaning controlling the temperature, the humidity, the light. We want to prevent or slow the agents of deterioration. Then we want to document it, determining the condition, the construction, the materials and the technique, which is a relatively new concept in all of art history. It’s really only the last 40 years or so that conservation has become more of a science instead of a craft. The sexy part is actually working on the painting, which is the preservation where we clean paintings and try to restore them as close to the original as possible. It would be great if that was all I did every day, but there are a lot of other things that go into taking care of the museum.
Like what?
Checking light levels, heat, temperature, humidity, periodic dusting, checking what insects are inside and if they could harm the art. We get called if someone has touched a painting and we need to check on it. My colleagues go outside and clean the outdoor sculptures a few times a year because they have to be washed and waxed. Then there are other things such as traveling with artwork when we loan [it]. And when we have a show come here, we examine everything that comes in the door and then we check it when it leaves to make sure that it’s in the same condition it was when it arrived.
That sounds intense.
It is intense especially when you’re responsible for a $60 million Rembrandt or a $30 million Vermeer! People often ask if I’m nervous around artwork and I will say no, because when the artwork is in here, it’s my job. I make this analogy that when a surgeon is cutting into a person he’s not like, “Oh my God! I’m cutting into a person!” It loses its aura—it becomes just an object on the easel. Then, when it goes back on the wall, it regains its preciousness.
Will you walk us through a typical day?
I try to do my retouching in the morning. Retouching is where you touch in where all the paint has fallen off. Then I might give a tour to a group of interns here at the museum. We just bought a painting last week and I x-rayed it a few days ago; it took all morning to x-ray it, develop the films and put them together to examine what was in the x-ray.
What drew you to art history?
I signed up for this class focusing on Dutch and Flemish art, Jan Van Eyck to Bruegel and up to Rubens, 15th-, 16th-, 17th-century. That first day of art history class, the professor said, “Don’t take notes, just look.” And he showed us all these amazing paintings. I had been to art museums as a kid, but he started showing us Rogier van der Weyden and Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and I thought, ‘This is it.’ And to this day, it’s my favorite kind of art. [The same professor] wrote me a letter of recommendation to go to graduate school. The “e” was broken on his typewriter, so he had to handwrite all the “e”s into the recommendation letter.
What are some of your favorite works that you have helped to conserve?
One of my favorites is “The Last Judgement” by Crispijn van den Broeck, a 16th-century painting. When we bought the painting, it was shipped down here and the way it was framed, the wood couldn’t move… so when I unframed it, the wood finally said, ‘Ahh!’ and cracked in half. That was a bad day. But I restored the front, and when I think about my favorite painting in the last 19 years, I would think of that one.
What are some challenges in the art world?
It’s all changing. I would rather just go look at a painting. I don’t need an iPad, I don’t need a soundtrack, I don’t need entertainment. All I need is a painting, but I’m a dinosaur now. It’s all about audience engagement and selfies and hashtags. I’m not that old, but that is sort of the newer generation and how they want to interact with art.
What are the best parts of your job?
I’ve been able to travel to Japan—none of this has been on the taxpayer’s dime—Russia, Germany, Holland, Italy, England, and see beautiful art. Also working here in this institution with my colleagues and making sure this art is here for future generations. It’s something that is difficult to think of because of the immediacy of our society. Like the Crispijn van den Broeck painting, that artist painted it with the intent to last forever. It’s still here 500 years later.
Does it ever strike you, when you are holding something that’s 500 years old, just how incredible that is?
Yes! So a painting that I was working on, the tree that it was painted on was cut down 50 years before the Jamestown Colony was established here. Christopher Columbus had just died when the tree was cut down. That’s how old the painting is and also how young our country is. You go to Munich, and you’re in a 13th century church or a restaurant that has been there for 700 years.
Do you make any art in your free time?
Not really. I dabble in calligraphy and watercolor, but once you look at a really good painting, it’s hard to go back and paint a picture of your cat.
Are there any misconceptions people have about your field?
Well, it’s not like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters 2. Also, I want to make sure that people know that you get what you pay for. There is a sad truth to my field and the sad truth is that I am not certified. I have credentials, I have my undergrad degree, I have my graduate degree, I have my internship, my portfolio, I have the word of my colleagues, I have my publications…however, anyone today can say they are a conservator and there is nothing I can do to stop them.
Have you seen any examples of something going horribly wrong?
We have a painting here that someone put masking tape on, duct tape, people have nailed paintings to boards…there is a lot of bad restoration going on.
Like that woman who “restored” the mural of Jesus and it resembled a monkey?
Yes, exactly. Poor “Ecce Homo.” But you know? That city, Borja, in Spain made so much money from people coming to visit that painting that they are opening a visitor center. So, it’s been a boon to their economy.
by Cameron Walker | Dec 2, 2016 | December 2016 / January 2017, Eat
The first time Buku Executive Chef Amanda Haisley cooked solo, she almost set the kitchen on fire.
“My sister was babysitting and my parents were out of the house,” she says. “My mom had this Sophia Loren cookbook and there was a recipe for Neapolitan pizza. I made the dough myself and cranked the oven up to 500 degrees, which of course made it smoke the whole house out…but the pizza turned out really great.”
Haisley, 27, never truly considered another occupation, though she flirted with the idea of studying art or math education. She cooked in several kitchens throughout high school and, in 2007, began classes at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. The curriculum included working in the school’s restaurants and studying a variety of subjects beyond cooking, like business, economics and psychology, which she says has been helpful in learning to manage a restaurant.
While in school, she took a whirlwind trip across Italy sampling wine and food, connecting on a deeper level to the cuisine on which she was raised. She grew up in Lancaster, NY, watching her mother, a third generation Italian-American, cook traditional dishes.
“Her grandmother was from Calabria in Southern Italy, and obviously [the recipes] go through a filter each generation, but my mom made a good amount of Italian food, and it was always very simple…lots of fish, lots of garlic, lots of fresh herbs,” she says.
This early introduction to fresh, straightforward food influenced her cooking philosophy. “I am very simple and hands-off almost, about food,” she says. “I have a soft spot in my heart for gorgeous food, really fresh produce and well-raised animals. I just believe in letting the product do its thing, not messing with it too much. It’s pretty awesome as it is. I really enjoy the interesting flavors we have here at Buku; it’s keeping things simple, but with a twist.”
Haisley followed her parents and sister to Raleigh soon after her graduation from culinary school and started working at Buku as a sous chef in 2011. She was promoted to executive chef in the spring of 2014, and considers her early years at the restaurant an extension of her education.
“The owners, Tony [Hopkins] and Sean [Degnan] are great. I’ve become very close with them and been able to pick their brains and see the innards of how a business works,” she says. “I’m highly influenced by the people I work with. We’re a great team, and we all learn from each other.”
Buku bills itself as “global street food.” The menu, full of big flavors from other continents, pays upscale homage to humble food cart items from around the world: Vietnamese pho, duck larb and Korean barbecue bibimbap coexist with Argentinean short rib, Hawaiian tuna poke and roasted sweet potato pierogies.
“We wanted to examine all the unique little niches around the world, the kind of Anthony Bourdain-type stuff that people don’t usually get to try when they’re tourists,” she says. “Little by little we are pushing the limits [of] our food, and I’d like to keep seeing that progress…not just for this place, but with the whole city. It will be interesting to see how our food scene grows.”
Lately, she has been part of the team developing the concept and menu for Soca, Buku’s new Caribbean and Latin American-inspired sister restaurant, set to open January 17 in Cameron Village, but she will be staying at the helm of Buku downtown.
“It’s important to cook from your heart,” she says. “You’re trying to make somebody happy at the end of the day, making something they are really going to enjoy, maybe make them think of a memory. Maybe they’ll remember that they had a really wonderful dish while they were at Buku.”
by Cameron Walker | Nov 7, 2016 | November 2016, Retreat, Stuff
The next frontier of homebuying apps
In the old days of real estate, buyers often had to wait two weeks to learn of new homes on the market. Even in the late 1990s, properties for sale were listed in thick black-and-white books put out by the local Multiple Listing Service, which were guarded closely by real estate agents and outdated by the time they were printed. Today, technology empowers buyers with easy access to up-to-the-minute listings and far more information than would fit on the printed page.
“I loved the Realtor.com app because I could research homes without having to bombard my agent with questions in the middle of the night,” says Jenée Mobley, recent Triangle homebuyer. “It provided me with an easy-to-read map with relevant listings. If you zoomed in, you could view nearby properties that were not for sale to see when those were purchased and at what price.”
Popular house-hunting sites Trulia, Redfin and Zillow all have their own apps too, with features like neighborhood statistics, crime maps, video walkthroughs and mortgage calculators. Buyers are now able to get information on homes for sale almost as fast as their agents.
“The problem is that a little bit of knowledge tends to be a very dangerous thing when they don’t have all the pieces,” says United Real Estate owner Tristan Pan. “They’ll go on Zillow, which will give them their so-called Zestimate and they will think that’s the price. But the Zestimates are highly inaccurate because they don’t factor for a lot of things internal to the house.”
But with a bit of caution, buyers can take advantage of an arsenal of new home buying tools.
“My clients have been using Homesnap, which allows you to take a picture of any house, whether it’s on the market or not, and on-line information is available very quickly,” says Re/Max United Realtor Carson Cobb. “Another app people are starting to use is called HomeSpotter, [which is] supposed to make it easier for Realtor and client to share pictures and information—basically have a conversation about a home.”
United Real Estate worked with a developer to create its own search app with a GPS-based proximity sensor to help buyers locate the nearest homes for sale. The feature was so popular, Pan says, the company has licensed it for use by other companies.
“In the future, we will see the continued proliferation of apps that make searching for properties easier for buyers and sellers,” says Chip Barker, Realtor with Better Homes and Gardens Go Realty. His clients also use apps such as Docusign, which enables them to sign contracts from anywhere; GreatSchools.org, with information, reviews and ratings of local schools; and iMAPS, an interactive mapping app sponsored by local government that includes layers of information, including aerial views and environmental data.
But the future of real estate technology is more than apps. Evolving drone technology (and a favorable ruling by the FAA) allows sellers to showcase their property with 360-degree views and even capture smooth interior video. Navigable 3-D tours from vendors such as Matterport help buyers envision themselves in a home, and virtual tours will become truly immersive as they are paired with technology like Google Daydream, a virtual reality headset system.
And this is only the beginning; tomorrow’s real estate technology will only become more mobile, more intuitive, more timely. Now, if only someone will create an app to move all your stuff!
by Cameron Walker | Nov 7, 2016 | Eat, November 2016
Chef Serge Falcoz-Vigne seasons his dishes with love
“When I was a kid, I was happy when all the family was together around the table,” says Serge Falcoz-Vigne, who took over as chef and General Manager at Saint Jacques French Cuisine in April. Every Sunday in his hometown of Grenoble, France, his family would visit one grandmother in the morning and the other at night—fueling a bit of a culinary competition between the two.
“The grandmothers would always make such good food, with the idea that they always wanted to make it better,” he says. “Food is love. Imagine, a grandmother waits, she thinks about the people who are going to come…She wants to do something to think about you and give you love. I try to do that with all of the customers every time I cook.”
His customers are feeling the love. Saint Jacques has garnered five stars and is rated number one in the Triangle on the review site OpenTable, based on feedback from 1,500 diners. The menu is classic French with a focus on fresh, local ingredients: duck confit with cassoulet, filet mignon with foie gras and black truffle sauce, Pamlico Sound shrimp and scallops in cream sauce.
“My vision for this place is to make a lot of people very happy,” he says. “To enjoy all the food and discover something, too—to wake up the curiosity of everybody.”
At 15, the now 48-year-old Falcoz-Vigne knew he wanted to become a chef. At this young age, he applied for and was granted special permission to apprentice at a local restaurant, working two shifts a day, six days a week while continuing his studies.
“I would do it again,” he says. “When I started, I didn’t even know the difference between a shallot and an onion. At this point in my life, what made me live, what made me present, was food… a good moment of joy and happiness, cooking, eating, sharing.”
He moved to Paris after receiving his diploma, dabbling in the city’s theater scene and honing his skills in the kitchen. In 1994, he and two friends bought Au Passé Retrouvé, a traditional French restaurant in the 15th arrondissement whose name loosely translates to “the re-found past.” He met his now-wife Samantha, a Raleigh native, at his restaurant, and when he sold it in 2007, the couple and their young son, Jack, moved to North Carolina and made the Triangle their home.
He worked as executive chef at 411 West in Chapel Hill, then Raleigh’s 518 West and, most recently, 18 Seaboard. Here, he found a growing community of world-class chefs; and much like the friendly rivalry between his grandmothers, this healthy competition pushes him to do better, to be a better chef.
He draws parallels between French and Southern cuisine—that food is best when it combines simple ingredients into delicious flavors, that good cooking takes time and can’t be rushed. The issue he takes with American food is the need for consistency, for assembly-line sameness.
“You know why? It’s Ronald McDonald. He teaches people you can have the same thing every day in America, everywhere in the world. But people don’t want to have the same flavor every day. Every time they come they want to have something they enjoy the same, but it doesn’t need to be exactly the same.”
He took over the restaurant this spring, a task he compares to restarting an old train. The parts were there, the cars in a graceful line, pointing in the right direction, but it needed to be repainted, refueled, restarted.
“Can you imagine all the energy you need to start a train?” he asks. “You have to use all your energy to make it work. The business needed a refreshment: change the carpet, change the paint on the walls, change the bar…the menu is changed, more French.”
Falcoz-Vigne says his menu is more authentic, truer to the dishes he cooked for decades in France and more beholden to fresh, local ingredients. But he’s not afraid to experiment, testing out dishes in the cool morning kitchen.
“Just by looking at the food, you know a lot about the guy who makes it,” says Falcoz-Vigne. “It’s like a crystal ball. If he’s happy, he’s going to make happy food. If you cook with love, people get it and they want more.”
by Cameron Walker | Oct 10, 2016 | Buzz, October 2016
CHASS researcher Ann Ross and a human skull. PHOTO BY ROGER WINSTEAD
There are stories written in our bones, and forensic anthropologist—and speaker for the dead—Dr. Ann Ross has made it her life’s work to tell them. However, her path wasn’t always so straightforward.
“I started out as an undergraduate doing Latin American Studies,” says Ross, a native of Colón, Panama. “Then my last semester of undergrad I took a class called Introduction to Physical Anthropology. I was like, ‘Wow. I totally messed up…that’s what I should have done!’”
So she returned to school, picked up a second bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Florida Atlantic University, completed an internship at Miami Dade Medical Examiner’s Office under the innovative Dr. Joe Davis and earned her master’s degree at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, home to the Body Farm, where scientists study the decomposition of human remains. While working on her doctorate, she traveled to Bosnia to assist human rights groups with the identification of victims of genocide. After earning her Ph.D., she spent three years doing post-doctoral work at the University of Florida’s C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, which she calls her “finishing school.” She has been a professor at N.C. State since 2003.
What does your average day look like?
My main role is actually as a professor at N.C. State. I generally teach one class a semester and run several research projects. We also conduct cases for the state of North Carolina. We are experts in bone, so for anything that happens to the skeleton we get called in as consultants. A good proportion, maybe 40 percent of our work, is to do side-by-side antemortem and postmortem x-ray comparisons. Everyone has had x-rays in life, whether it’s a knee injury or an ankle. So what law enforcement does, if they have a missing person or a potential presumptive identification, they collect that information from when they were alive. Then we take x-rays of the bones themselves and make a comparison.
When you are called to testify, for example, is it always a case that ends in death?
Always. The cases with children are really hard, and you always end up living the case until you can figure something out. It’s a really low part of the job, but, because [the death is] usually produced by a parent or a loved one, you are their only advocate.
What is the best part of what you do?
One of the high points of our job is, hopefully, in the cases where we’ve had homicides, to have our prosecutors convict the perpetrator and give at least some peace to the family members.
What are some common misconceptions of your job?
If you’ve watched the television show “Bones,” we don’t have holograms to do reconstructions of the scene and the crime. Another thing is that we work under full light conditions. If you notice that on “CSI” and “Bones,” everybody is working in the dark. You really need to have all the lights turned on… plus a magnifying glass. They show up in their Humvees too. The university hasn’t provided one for me yet; I should probably ask.
What else is different from TV?
On the original “CSI,” they could run a DNA sample in two minutes and get a match… but it doesn’t really work that way. First of all, to get a match you need to have something to compare it to. And they put fingerprints through the little computer, and then— bam!—they get a face associated with that fingerprint. Actually, fingerprints are manually scored by print analysts. There’s no automation involved there. So when you come to court and they’re like, “Why didn’t you just do DNA and get a face?,” it’s science fiction. We’re not there yet.
What can the body that we leave behind tell you about our death?
If it’s an unidentified person, we can tell how old you were when you died; we can tell how tall you were; we can tell if you were male or female. We can tell if there was anything that happened during your life, like fractures or disease processes. Ultimately, our job is to find out what happened to you so we can give a scientific opinion to the medical examiner. We can also tell the place of ancestral origin of your remains.
What do you consider your most important work so far?
I developed a software program with my colleague Dennis Slice at Florida State University. If you have an unidentified skull, we can take anatomical landmarks of the skull and plug it into the software, and it will tell you biological sex and ancestry. Last year, we doubled our reference sample to make it applicable to Europeans and others, especially with the migrant crises. It was funded by the National Institute of Justice so the software is free.
What do you tell your students who are interested in pursuing a similar career?
I would say in forensic science in general 80 percent of the scientists are women, but most of the positions of leadership are still held by men. It’s very important for women to mentor women and to help guide them and maneuver some of the intricacies of getting through the job system. ν
