A Rather Fowl Situation

support for this video comes from skillshare which offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people on topics including illustration design photography video freelancing and more do any work long enough and one is bound to come across a variety of projects those that excite and make you want to roll up your sleeves and get to work and those that make you want to close up shop and run for the hills and everything in between but usually you become a steady freddie and you're immune to wild reactions but sometimes a painting comes in and you just have to step back because the damage is impressive such was the case with this beautiful painting of a boy coming back from the hunt torn in just about every which way with multiple pieces of missing canvas a few old conservation attempts and of course a yellowed varnish this painting is going to need some tender loving care the owner of this painting's father as a young boy with his family was stationed in germany shortly after the end of world war ii as avid outdoors people and hunters the responsibility for providing food and keeping this struggling german village fed largely fell on them they hunted wild boar wild turkey venison and just about anything else that could keep the village going as such the father developed a sort of kinship with the boy depicted in this painting and carried it back with them from germany passed it down through the generations to the current owner where it has ended up in my studio and while hunting is certainly a way to get up and close with nature particularly our furried friends i would argue that maybe there's a kinder approach maybe just capturing them i i mean on photograph that is and if you think that sounds hard well you obviously haven't taken skillshare's wildlife photography capturing portraits of your favorite animals with constapnka squirrel whisperer so instead of just watching videos about artwork you can make your own but don't turn this off though really don't and this class will teach you everything from gear and settings how to find great locations how to shoot portraits of animals and most importantly how to whisper to squirrels skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for anyone who loves learning and wants to explore their creativity skillshare's videos are ad-free so you can stay in the zone while you're exploring new skills new premium classes are launched each week so there's always something new to discover and the entire catalog is available with subtitles in spanish french portuguese and german i'm particularly interested in this class not because i have any interest in squirrels but because i want to learn how to take better photos of the most important animal in my life my pet dog miko the first 1 000 people to use the link on my description box or my code will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start whispering to all of those squirrels [Music] so where to start well it's tempting to throw your hands up and say i don't know but by dissecting the project into a series of steps it all starts to make sense and the first step is to remove this canvas from the stretcher clearly it is not held on very well pieces of the tacking edge are missing and many of the tacks have just pulled through the canvas but there are some that are still embedded through the canvas and it's important to remove them because missing one could hang up that canvas and cause it to tear or rip or distort or otherwise do some funny stuff that we don't want to have happen even these tacks where the head is missing are still holding canvas so they need to be pried out with a pair of pliers once all of the tacks have been removed and i double check just to make sure i haven't missed any it happens i can remove the painting from the stretcher but this canvas is too fragile just to handle so i'm going to flip it with the use of two acid-free sheets of foam core place on the top and the bottom and then a hope and a prayer i can flip the painting over and well hope that nothing bad happened the flip was successful but the back of the canvas oh boy it doesn't look good there is kind of a history of failed attempts at repairing this painting duct tape patches glue just about everything so i need to deal with all of that i'm going to jump right in and peel off this duct tape usually duct tape is a nightmare to remove because the glue melts and it sticks to everything but in this case it has deteriorated and dried out so it's pretty easy to peel off i particularly like the green felt placed around the tears to i don't know make it look a little bit better a plus for effort in some cases the duct tape is still stuck on and the use of a palette knife to peel it off is what's called for there is some residue that i'll have to clean up but really what i'm concerned about are these patches here it looks like some cotton muslin just a utility fabric has been glued down to the canvas with some sort of synthetic adhesive i don't know exactly what this is and i'll have to figure that out later because of course i have to remove it but for now i'm just focused on getting all of these patches off one two three four five six or seven it's a lot of work and i decided to peel them off dry because i could i didn't want to introduce solvent just yet and now the stretcher can be removed but what we find is a lot of accumulated dust and dirt and debris behind the canvas in fact there is so much that just a brush won't remove it i have to use a pallet knife to scrape it off of the canvas but it's only dust and so eventually it does yield to the power of the pallet knife i mentioned that i needed to remove all of this adhesive because it will interfere with well just about every treatment that i want to do going forward and because i don't know what kind of adhesive it is i'm going to take a series of solvent gels and solvents and place them in the four corners allow them to sit and see which one is most effective the first one is getting off that adhesive but it's not really effective and my concern is that it's just gonna take too much time and be too much effort the second one is totally useless it's not doing anything the third one well now we have some movement but it still requires a lot of effort by the blade and i'd like to avoid that if possible so fingers crossed and it looks like number four is the winner it breaks down that adhesive really effectively i'm going to place that solvent gel on all of the adhesive squares and give it a few minutes to start working sometimes it can take as short as seconds sometimes it takes minutes but once it has started to dissolve and break down that adhesive i can come back with a scalpel and start removing it swift action gliding over the surface and scraping off the glue is what's called for here some of the nap of the canvas is removed but that's just inevitable and it doesn't affect the structural stability of the canvas at all in addition this canvas is definitely getting an interleaved lining so i'm not terribly concerned about any impact that the blade has here and once all of this is removed we can see it was a lot for a very small tear so i mentioned that there were six or seven of these patches and i will go methodically one patch after the other and remove all of this adhesive if i left it well it would telegraph to the front of the canvas when i did the lining and also it would gum up the works this adhesive is most likely not going to play nice with the modern adhesives that i'm going to use during the interleave process now this on the other hand this is something that's going to have to be reckoned with instead of a patch it looks like something was just embedded into this tear and i'll have to figure out how to remove that but first i have to flip the canvas over again with the use of the foam cores this is going to be a common theme here and i'm going to get really good at this by the end of this project and transfer it over to the back half of the studio to the hot table where i can do the first of the treatments this canvas was incredibly distorted there were waves and ripples and all sorts of bumps and dents you can see them there in a raking light and i need to remove all of them so that i can align the canvas and then prepare it for the lining process and having a hot table makes this a very simple straightforward procedure through the employment of moisture heat and pressure we can take the canvas and transform it into a pliable state when it's in that pliable state and that's what the moisture and the heat do we can then use pressure to flatten it as it dries and cools and sets into a new state sometimes we have to add moisture to the painting because the canvas is very dry or it needs extra moisture but in this case it didn't the ambient moisture that the canvas absorbed is enough and once the table gets up to pressure and heat well we can see the moisture being drawn out of that canvas remember that bulge yeah that's it anytime the painting goes on a hot table for a flattening treatment it must go under weights for a few days to acclimatize for any residual moisture to be drawn out by the blotter paper and for it to remain flat if we didn't do this step the painting would just curl up and well we'd be back to square one i'm going to have to transfer this painting to the front half of the studio and i want to be careful here because it's flat i don't want to cause any ripples or damage to the canvas but again using a board i can transfer it relatively easily to another table before i do anything else i need to address this bulge it looks like the canvas tore and instead of repairing it somebody just embedded something into the deformation to make the surface flat and so that deformation previously went backwards but after the treatment on the hot table now the canvas is flat and all of that material is pressing forwards so we have this big ugly wart that needs to be removed i'm going to be using a solvent gel to remove the over painting from this area to see what i have i am hopeful and optimistic that it's just some sort of fill-in medium and that this overpainting will reveal that but my optimism was premature it looks like this is just oil paint gobs and gobs and gobs of oil paint that have been layered in to that deformation to make it flat on the front using a scalpel i will have to chip out and shave off all of this oil paint but i'll get there eventually i want this to be smooth and there's no other way to do it sometimes a little bit more solvent gel to break down and soften up that oil paint is what's called for and sometimes a mechanical approach scraping and shaving off that softened oil paint is what's going to do the trick but i'll get it done one way or the other because that canvas where the tear was deformed a little bit during the removal i have to press it so once again flip the painting over transfer it to another table and do another procedure and here i'm going to press out that area just locally i don't want to take this painting back to the hot table just for a one square inch deformation when i can do it locally with a little bit of moisture on a blotter paper and some felt a bladder paper is dampened it's placed on the area of deformation the felt is then placed on top to provide some air and then a set of weights goes on the canvas because this is localized i don't need to apply heat but i could if i felt it was necessary while that is doing its job i'm going to go over the canvas and remove all of the areas of old duct tape adhesive residue and areas where the bladder paper stuck to the canvas sometimes it does that when there is adhesive residues and i need all of that gone because not only will it mess up the lining process but it'll create little bumps on the surface remember those huge losses of canvas well they need to be filled in and i can't just use my fill-in medium because it will inevitably crack and flake out even though it's flexible i don't trust it for areas that large so i'm going to use a canvas inlay and i'll turn to my stock of old canvases to find one that matches the weight and the weave of the existing certainly matching the color would be ideal but because this is getting aligning nobody's going to see this so i'm not that concerned with it once i have oriented the new canvas underneath the original i can start tracing the area of loss and i want to be really precise here because i want this to be as tight of a fit as could be i have often thought about other techniques that would achieve this same result maybe the use of a camera and a laser cutter or a plotter to cut out this canvas but by the time i shoot the area convert it into a cad print and then get it inlaid well i could have just done it analog it's a lesson in the seductive nature of technology and how it's not always the solution sometimes good old-fashioned handcraft is all that's called for there are a few other areas of losses that i'm going to go through and replace with inlaid canvas anything that's larger than about a quarter of an inch square is a candidate for inlay but these inlays are just floating there not only will they move when i transfer the canvas but they potentially will move during the lining process and the worst case scenario they'd shift and go underneath the original and create a bulge or a lip then i'd have to undo all of that work to prevent this i'm turning to my old friend washi kozo and i'm tearing off a bunch of little strips i'm tearing them as opposed to cutting them because i want a really loose and frayed edge i don't want anything crisp i'll turn to a water-based adhesive and paint it on the area of the joint then once i have good coverage i'll lay down that washi cozo into that adhesive the washi cozo is going to keep this in place but it's also going to do another thing because this is a water-based adhesive it's going to shrink a little bit as it dries and that's going to pull those canvases together just a little bit we're talking fractions of a millimeter here but it's enough to keep that joint tight which is precisely what i want because the tighter the joint the less fill in medium i have to use and that's always better fill in medium is not the answer it is a well i guess it is the answer sometimes but if we can avoid using a lot of it that's better in this area the canvas has shrunk and distorted quite a bit you can see that when i let go the tear opens up i want to try to pull that closed there are many ways that i could do this but because this painting needs this lining this is going to be the most effective approach after pressing those areas with a little bit of release film i can then come back with some felt and more weights the release film doesn't allow the adhesive to dry but it allows it to lose some of its tack so once the felt is placed on airflow can let that adhesive dry and then after a day or two i can come and remove all of these weights and see what we have you know how carpenters say you can never have too many clamps well conservators say the same thing about weights and now we can finally get this painting prepared for its interleaved lining after cleaning it off with a brush i'm going to lay down a sheet of flat spun nylon gossamer and i like to use this when the painting has a lot of tears and it's really really damaged because i feel like it's a nice intermediary between the canvas which has texture and the p-e-t film which is very smooth sometimes i feel like that interface doesn't allow full contact between the canvas weave and the pet film and that could make a well compromised glue joint after assembling all of the pieces the new lining canvas which has an adhesive film on it the pet film which is coated in adhesive and the original canvas which has that nylon gossamer on it the sandwich so to speak i can put it on the hot table cover it with another sheet of pet film tape it down to the hot table create an airtight envelope put in the through connectors that will allow me to draw out the air i can turn the table on and then draw out the air once it's come up to temperature rubbing over the painting with a piece of felt because it's hot after all and then turning to a bone folder or a brayer i can help work some of these areas that i'm concerned about lying flat to make sure that they are flat with the lining complete i can now focus on really the exciting part cleaning the painting but before i do that i have to get rid of some of the adhesive that has oozed through the cracks and tears using the solvent that the adhesive is based on with a quick run over it you can see the solvent and the adhesive interact and the adhesive becomes soft and just like that i can remove it what i'm not removing is any surface grime or old varnish this modern conservation adhesive doesn't interact with the old materials which is precisely why we use it i'll pass over the entire painting and get rid of all this adhesive because if i don't i can't get to the varnish layer and that is what i now need to remove i made some tests and i determined that this painting didn't have a heavy layer of accumulated surface grime it was conserved or worked on in the past and at that point it was probably cleaned and then it was stored in a box well because of its state underneath the bed and that kept it pretty clean but the old varnish did discolor as is the case with all natural resin varnishes exposure to ambient light the uv rays cause it to turn brown as you can see here and though this painting isn't profoundly dirty it's not night and day it's more like mid-afternoon to late afternoon simply removing this layer of discolored brown varnish does make a difference we can see that the whites of these leaks well they're white they're not cream-colored or yellow and that matters even in an area here like the feathers when i remove the varnish from this little section we can see that the whites are cooler they're more blue than they are warm and that subtle change does make a difference a painting doesn't have to be filthy filthy brown and dirty for a cleaning to matter a painting is filled with a variety of tones the artist has a broad color palette at their disposal and so somewhere like this coat where it looks really warm and brownish yellowish when we remove that varnish it starts to get a cooler color and that matters because color and temperature are one of the tools that an artist can use to move you through the picture and now onto the face i always leave the face for last and there are a couple of reasons first and foremost it's probably the most important part of the painting and i don't want to take any chances so by cleaning the rest of the painting it gives me an opportunity to gather data on the artist's technique the materials and how they react with the cleaning solutions that i'm using i can then moderate my approach if necessary so that the most important part of the painting there's no taking any chances i am fully confident in what i'm doing but also because it's the face it's the thing we look at it's the thing that's most exciting and yes this painting isn't profoundly dirty but a subtle shift in the color palette that the artist chose does make a difference seeing his eyes as cool bright blue as opposed to grayish greenish hazel well that changes him and he looks dare i say more alive i know maybe that's a bridge too far and an extrapolation that's coming from me looking at lots of paintings but i honestly feel that once the face is cleaned it feels more full it feels less flat it feels more real once the painting is fully cleaned i can prepare for retouching and to do that i need to fill in all the areas of loss yes i did inlay canvas and i did pull those tears closed i was even able to get some of them so tight that the canvas weave was lining up but unfortunately when canvas tears well paint is lost even if it's just a little bit here this is less than a millimeter thick in some places but we have to fill it in because if we don't the retouching has nowhere to go and you're going to see it when it's varnished which we don't want this painting is largely devoid of heavy impasto the physical buildup of the paint layer which makes for an easy fill-in process i just have to get it smooth and i'll overfill just about everywhere on this canvas you can see it looks kind of messy and it's much easier to put a lot on and then to come back and remove it than to try to just put the fill in where it's necessary trust me i've tried and it's a fool's errand before it dries completely i can come back with my hand and remove some of that villain medium using my fingers in my hand gives me a great sensitivity and i can feel if i'll need to make a second pass if there's a little divot or if there's a gap using a swab is certainly something that i do all the time or a piece of felt and it can be very effective but there's nothing like the touch of one's fingertips once this has dried in other places i will use a dampened swab to come back soften it up and remove the mask before i come back with my fingers and my palm an old printmaker's technique and it's funny to spend all this time putting stuff on that you're just gonna take off but this is how it goes no way around it because the original support was well fine it wasn't broken cracked distorted warped rotted or otherwise compromised i can reuse it after a quick cleaning i'll square it up and then i'll orient the painting onto the stretcher and then i'll begin the process which starts with a few tacks placed in the center of each edge and these are really just to hold it in place now with a regular canvas that's not interleaved these tacks are critically important into making sure that the center of the painting is taut and flat i like to use tacks other people argue that they're slow and that staples are much faster but this entire painting took 5 minutes and 22 seconds yes i timed it to stretch so argue with me about how staples would be any faster and any better because they're not and i'll fight you on that one once the painting is fully stretched i can then put the keys into the stretcher again because this has an interleave the keys aren't really adding tension to the canvas but they are holding this stretcher together keep in mind this stretcher has no glues or nails in the joints they're free floating so these keys keep it tight and prevent any further distortions and now we come to isolation layers and i'll explain this again i do this in every video but for some reason it doesn't always come through this painting is stable against the solvents and the paints that i will use during retouching so this isolation layer isn't meant to protect the painting it's meant to give me a better chance at matching my colors accurately you can see that where i put on the isolation layer the paint looks different and so i want to retouch to that as opposed to a dry washed out painting because if i do that when i put the final varnish on my colors which were matched to a dry painting will not look correct and i'll have to remove it and start all over again this makes sense gee i hope so with the isolation layer dry it is now time to start retouching and this painting had quite a bit of retouching and different types there was the massive massive missing section of canvas in the center of the painting but that was relatively boring and not all that interesting to do it was just a mix of browns and greens and blacks and you know it's not that interesting some of the tears however were interesting like this one that went right through the boy's face this is always an exciting type of retouching because it's impactful making this tear disappear will make the painting really come together and that's not to say that the other retouching throughout the painting isn't important it is you can't just leave one spot of retouching alone and do the others but this goes right through the face and so it's not only important to get it really accurate for the viewer but it's really fun for the conservator because this is what we really like high stakes really impactful areas of retouching but this is actually pretty difficult i mean think about it that massive area of canvas loss in the center well that was mostly one color it's kind of greenish grays browns blacks but there was nothing really there here there are so many colors it is almost impossible to keep track and they change from millimeter to millimeter now every once in a while i'm gonna run over the painting with a cotton ball like you just saw me do and that's to add a little bit of spirits to the retouching paints they dry out and get a little bit lighter as they dry and so it's important that i can simulate what they'll look like with a varnish applied so that i don't keep going over the area i've just retouched and even though this is somewhat tedious and lots and lots of color mixing the fact that my palette pretty much has every single color ever mixed already on it makes doing this type of retouching actually a little bit easier i don't have to remix every single color from the start i can just reactivate these paints that are on my palette and bring them up to the painting and adjust them from there so with a little bit of spirits i'll do a final pass just to make sure that i'm happy with the way everything looks and when the colors match and i consider it good well that's it i'm done except for all the retouching of course once all of the other less interesting retouching is complete i can varnish the painting and this is the final layer that provides the uv protection and decides the sheen and today i've decided to spray the varnish on using my hvlp system i've been doing a bunch of spraying of paint yes on that car that seems to be in every shot and i've become really familiar with all of the little tricks and nuances of a spray gun and so i feel like i'm more adept at using it now the first pass i will make close to the canvas and really get the entire painting covered and then as the solvent flashes off i'll make a second pass a little bit higher up from the canvas and as the varnish atomizes in the air it's going to start to dry and when it hits the canvas it's not really wet it's a little bit dry and a little bit crystally and once the varnish is dry well the painting is all complete and complete it is all of the areas of damage have been addressed all of the structural losses have been taken care of whether it's through an inlay or through bringing those pieces of canvas close together so that the tear wasn't open everything was filled in an isolation layer was put down and then the retouching was executed finally the varnish ties it all together and gives it a beautiful sheen and as the raking light passes over it it's almost impossible to see those tears yes if you hunt for them you can kind of see a little bit of a scar so to speak but when a canvas is that torn it is almost inevitable that any ethical conservation will not be able to fully conceal the evidence of the damage and that's not really the point we're trying to make sure that when we look at this painting we see the hole not the parts we see the image the atmosphere and not the damage we want to see the forest not the trees you remember what it looked like beforehand well this was all trees and stones and sticks and leaves and dirt but afterwards well i think his situation isn't so foul anymore in fact i think it's rather pheasant thanks for watching and join me over on patreon for a q a about this and other projects in addition to ad-free early videos

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 550,373

Keywords: Baumgartner, Julian, restoration, ASMR, paintings, cleaning, scraping, repair, Art, fine art, conservation, painting restoration, old art, painting, painting conservation, oil painting, new again, restore

Id: bXVr0tDBp6A

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/i_have_a_dragon-]

I Iove this channel, but I totally watch it on silent.

[u/OrionStars3]

Why are the comments so against Baumgartner? Every interaction I’ve had with him was pleasant and his videos have been so nice to watch, too.