Meet Ron Barbagallo

 

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ron Barbagallo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Ron, so happy you were able to devote some time to sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our community. So, we’ve always admired how you have seemingly never let nay-sayers or haters keep you down. Can you talk to us about how to persist despite the negative energy that so often is thrown at folks trying to do something special with their lives?

In the industries where I work, there’s often an awkward dance that goes on between those who are physically preserving history and those who are responsible for shaping how history is presented to the public.

What I mean by that is: there are specialists who dedicate themselves to the painstaking work of restoration and preservation, and there are also people at large institutions whose role is to control that dialogue, even when what they have to say isn’t true. Sometimes their publicity is adjusted to fit a narrative that aligns more with institutional goals and the goals of their associates — than with the truth.

If you work independently and are unwilling to let strangers in related fields put their name on your work, institutions will find someone more compliant, someone they can easily integrate into their machine. And the publicity they generate is much less about the truth, and more about how they need the public to feel on any given topic.

But restoration itself isn’t something that can be spun or inpainted with Jedi-Mind tricks or politics. It’s a craft where the results are either right or not right.

I often say, “There are a million ways it can look wrong, but only one way it looks right.” That isn’t about personal opinion — it’s about visual integrity. A paint color can look one way when it’s wet and another when it’s dry. The top of a paint layer can differ from the bottom, depending on how the pigments, dyes, and binders settle. And this is especially true if the surface has been exposed to light over time.

For much of my career, I’ve been treated as if my role was to silently serve others in related fields — taking their calls or emails that assumed my time, knowledge, and work were theirs to use. It was surprising to see how entitled people are to take one thing or another, and the way they carry on when they don’t get what they want from you. Setting boundaries in those situations was not always easy, and more times than not, it reveals how uncomfortable people can become when asked to respect limits.

More than a decade ago, I made a conscious decision to step back from those dynamics and focus instead on building something lasting.

Today my attention is on legacy.

That’s why I established my assets into a Library, and why I’ve written a novel — work that reflects my own voice and vision, and that I hope will remain intact for future generations.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’ve led a niche practice in animation art conservation, collaborating with wonderful people to restore and preserve some of the most fragile and iconic pieces in film history. My work has helped shape the visual memory of audiences around the world. Much of it has been behind the scenes — without screen credit, and until I began posting on social media, I had very limited visibility. Over the years, I’ve preserved animation artifacts that survived the collapse of World Trade Center One on 9/11; cared for production art from the eight Harry Potter films, The Dark Knight trilogy, and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride; and I restored Salvador Dalí’s narrative to the 1945–46 Disney short Destino back to Dalí original artistic intent.

What compels me isn’t only the repair of physical materials — it’s the meditation. Each piece begins a dialogue with the artifact itself: what can be pulled forward and needs to be left “as is” so the whole reads as it once did. Early on in my career, my work functioned as medicine after a family tragedy; I poured myself into my work for decades in what was an almost monastic way.

Then I got to a point where I needed to restore myself. Bring who I was back to the forefront. That’s where my novel comes in. The Final Word is a trauma-informed, musically and visually structured roman à clef that explores family dynamics and emotional inheritance. While not a biography, it’s rooted in my Sicilian heritage and the loss of my twin sister. Out of it, grew a photography project, the FOUND in LOS ANGELES project. Together, the book and the photographs did for me what my conservation work does for the public: they help preserve what matters before it disappears.

I’ve never seen what I do as just a job; to me it’s a body of work — one that I hope will stand on its own and remain intact for the future.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Listen to the materials
In my work, everything begins with observation and a constant back-and-forth judgment of what looks right and what looks wrong. Restoration is a dialogue between the artist’s original intent and the stability of the materials in front of you. It’s a balancing act between the small details and how they support the whole. After decades of working with these materials, I can often tell where a piece is headed just by the way the materials curl, crack, or its fissures. Nitrate, acetate, gouache, paper — they don’t lie. They tell you what has happened to them and what they need. That kind of understanding isn’t something you can be taught in a conservation program — it’s earned over time, through a sustained dialogue with the materials.

My advice:

If you want to work with others in this field, please approach them PROFESSIONALLY. Ask what it takes to bring you on board. Respect that people are busy. Don’t assume someone else will do your work for you because of where you work. If you’re just starting out, be honest about your level of experience. Knowing your limits projects integrity. And in this field, honesty and ability matter far more than how impressed you are about where you went to school.

2. Patience with the process

Restoration isn’t about being fast. Matching color and understanding what any wet color will look like when it is dry is like learning a foreign language. It requires patience. If you rush the process, you are making the end result about you and not about the art.

My advice:

Keep asking yourself, “Does this look right?” Let that question be your compass.

3. Precision over publicity
Restoration can’t be gamed with industry politics or publicity. The work is either accurate or it isn’t. Over the years, I’ve seen people lean on their titles and the institutions who employ them to suggest credibility. But in the end, it’s the work itself that endures.

My advice:

Build a body of work so specific and carefully executed that it can stand on its own, even without you in the room. Let your work “network” for you.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

If I had three decades left — as I plan to — here’s how I would spend them: preserving legacy.

The places that claim to celebrate excellence are not what they seem. Often they’re designed to shine a spotlight on themselves and on the people who fit their political or institutional needs, rather than on those doing the actual work. These kinds of environments tend to reward the culture where they work over substance, and the most aggressive voices often rise to the front — even if they aren’t the most talented.

I’ve experienced situations in my career where my generosity was taken advantage of, where work I freely shared was claimed by others. Those moments were difficult, but they also taught me the value of putting up boundaries, and the importance of protecting one’s own contributions.

So for the next thirty years, my focus will be on continuing to safeguard and expand what I’ve built.

My goal is to leave behind a body of work with my name on it — work that will allow future generations to connect the dots between what was preserved and how it was preserved. That, to me, is the essence of legacy: ensuring that the integrity of the work endures, no matter how noisy and self-involved the industry around it may become.

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