Meet the Yorkshire art couple who work with everyone from unknowns to Banksy

During a term studying in Venice, Richard invited Liz out on a date, asking her to meet him at the Rialto bridge over the Grand Canal. They have been together ever since.

Richard is now one of the leading art conservators in the country, specialising in the conservation and restoration of fine art on paper, including watercolour paintings, prints, maps, historical documents and other unusual artefacts.

He undertakes assignments for museums, galleries and private collectors, including helping to recover and repair artworks damaged in floods and fires.

“Before I graduated from university, I was lucky enough to spend time with conservators on wall paintings in churches and cathedrals all around the country and so when I graduated I had this interest in conservation but was particularly interested in working with paper,” he says.

“You get the handle of drawings and watercolours and I was really drawn to the connection that gives you to the artist.”

Richard did formal training as a paper conservator at Northumbria University before working for a museum in Oxford and than as a private conservator in Cambridge.

In 2004 he decided to set up his own business. “We’d decided to move to Yorkshire. Liz had given up her job in marketing to help launch the business, we had two young children and taken on a mortgage – it was quite daunting,” he recalls. But the work did start to come in. “Some came from word of mouth, others came from me phoning round curators. It’s such a niche profession with not that many people doing it – we are always going to be in demand.”

The couple were also lucky that the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield had recently opened and Richard won a contract to do all its print and watercolour conservation. “On the back of that, I found myself very busy,” he sayd.

Now working with his small team in a converted Tudor chapel at Markington Hall, on the outskirts of Harrogate, any given day might find him poring over a 15ft long scroll painting brought home from Japan by Rudyard Kipling, a Banksy painting, Charlotte Brontë’s unique miniature books, the label on a rare and original Buddy Holly acetate or a document dating back to the teenage King Edward VI.

It is delicate and highly technical work, requiring skill, dedication and knowledge. The price of failure can be not just financial but the potential loss of an irreplaceable piece of history.

Today, as Richard’s specialist consultancy, Artworks Conservation, marks 20 years in business, he is recognised as one of the UK’s leading and sought after authorities on paper conservation.

“With cuts in museum budgets, it’s more about responding to loans and exhibitions or emergencies like a flood rather than a programme of conservation. We work much more widely with art dealers and collectors,” he says.

Liz is quick to praise her husband’s work. “He is very self-deprecating,” she says. “The reason he is so successful is that he is very good at what he does. I have seen the before and after and the amazing transformation. Because he is so good at what he does, people come back. We’ve got clients who have been with us since day one. His quality and reputation goes not just nationally but internationally.”“I have had 30 years practice at it,” adds a laughing Richard, who has also teaches paper conservation. In terms of a career choice, he says conservation has seen something of resurgence with television shows such as Hidden Treasures and Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

One of the more recent areas they have moved into is replicas. “Museums who want to put together an exhibition they want to stay up for maybe tow to four years – a lot of art on paper can only be shown for three to four months and so we make replicas of things – we’ve done Shakespeare’s Will and Roald Dahl’s notebooks.

"We use inkjet printers and digital scanning, modern technology allows us to make these. We then hand finish to make them look like the original. We started making replicas of letters and diaries from the first world war. We send replicas all round the world including Nelson Mandela’s diary.

"They aren’t forgeries as we stamp everything that are replicas very clearly.”

Meanwhile, a few miles away Liz is the owner of the Watermark Gallery in the centre of Harrogate, where she represents more than 60 artists.

After securing an £8,000 Government grant aimed at encouraging small businesses to export, she visited the annual Affordable Art Fair in New York and now sells works to collectors in the USA, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, Dubai and Germany.as well as across the UK.

She has sold more than 1,000 paintings in the last five years, providing artists with a shop-window for their works and a valuable income stream in a sector where many struggle to earn both recognition and financial reward.

"I’ve always had an interest in art and music,” says Liz. “When the children were small we’d visit a lot of galleries and I used to think I could do that – I’d really like a gallery of my own, but was a dream really to have our own place.”

After 30 years in marketing travelling a lot with work, she decided she wanted a change. They had already started buying and selling their own art, more collectable modern British prints in particular. They started a website and that led into having some pop up shows and even a pop up shop at 2 Royal Parade, Harrogate.

When a really rundown shop further along Royal Parade became available they decided to open a gallery/

"It was a real struggle, no one seemed to want us to open a gallery here – in fact someone said to me ‘we don’t think you can afford to do this and that just made me more determined to do it and to do it really well,” says Liz who is also one of the first 50 women to join the Northern Powerhouse’s WIN ( Women’s International Networking) programme, designed to support female-led businesses to grow and expand.

They eventually got into the premises in November 2019 and it took three months to refurbish the shop. And opened on what was Liz’s mum’s 89th birthday – three weeks later the first lockdown happened and Liz contracted Covid.

"It was tough, we were closed seven and a half months in our first year but people were so positive. We quickly learned that local people were walking around town al the time as there was noting else to do.

"We changed the art the windows every two weeks to give people something different to look at. They would bang on the windows and give us the thumbs up. When we did open people said we had really helped to life their spirits and I think they rewarded us and came and purchased from us.

"We really wanted to make the gallery accessible. We have card racks at the entrance to the gallery to make people feel they can come in and just buy a card,” says who has also started to make jewellery.

“The benefit of the two of us working together is that Richard has such a great knowledge of art and I bring the business and marketing skill – together we know what we like and we can make it work. We are really proud of what we’ve done here.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​