Blue Skies Smilin' At Me; Conserving A Henry Ranger Seascape

[Music] for this video we're gonna follow along the conservation process of an oil-on-canvas by the American artist Henry Ranger and upon first glance this appears to be a fairly tonal seascape but that's not exactly the case and I want to jump right into the cleaning process because that's going to be the most exciting and arguably a most interesting part of this whole conservation now this was an oil-on-canvas that was glued down to a piece of hardboard like masonite at some point in the past and it was likely done because of some small damage and I'll deal with that if I find it and later on but really what's exciting about this painting is just how dirty it is there is so much surface grime and so much old varnish on this painting that as I start to clean it we can see that this isn't a tonal painting at all this painting is full of color full of life full of delicate beautiful brushwork that's just completely obscured by this thick heavy darkened varnish layer and so you can see just with a couple of square inches cleaned this is a totally different painting now this is a lot of old natural resin and old natural resin darkens with exposure to oxygen and ultraviolet light it degrades over time and when it does it turns yellow or brown or gray or cloudy or cracked and in this case this painting has so much varnish on it that it's almost like looking through a piece of tinted glass and so as we remove this varnish we can really get an idea of what Ranger wanted us to see what he saw when he painted the picture now as I'm cleaning this and as I'm removing all of this old varnish I'm also noticing that there are a lot of areas of over paint and you can start to see them come through and those are areas that are unnaturally dark on the sky there's an area right above my hand right there and on the left hand side of this painting there is a massive amount of over paint now generally over paint like this is done by an inexperienced conservator or just somebody who doesn't know any better and usually it's excessive and totally unnecessary and needs to be removed but I'm just kind of shocked at how much over paint is on this painting I mean if you look at that left-hand side just to the left of the boats there's a good eight or nine inches by three or four inches that is completely solidly over painted now that is there's a new layer of oil paint that's resting atop the original paint and that's really problematic not only because it betrays the artists original intent and it's not original to the painting but because in this case it's the totally wrong color now I suspect that whomever did this retouching whoever did this over painting probably didn't clean the painting before doing it and so they matched their over paint to a dirty painting and so naturally when I removed the old varnish they're over paint which was largely concealed when the painting was dirty becomes crystal clear and that's a really big problem because it looks lousy as I go along I'm starting to find more areas I just revealed one right there that are gonna need to be removed and my guess is that there was paint loss or maybe a small tear or a small hole in those spots and I'll have to deal with those later but first I've got to get all of this stuff off so I'm gonna go ahead and continue cleaning and I'm gonna step back and maybe I'll throw some music on and let you guys enjoy this process without me rambling on so sit tight I'll be back in a little bit [Music] you you [Music] you [Music] Oh [Music] you [Music] and so as we come to the end of the cleaning process we can see just how much over paint there is not only is the whole left side over painted but the whole right side the whole bottom edge and the whole top edge are over painted and that has me worried because whenever I see that much over paint I have a sneaking suspicion that there may not be any original paint left and if that's the case well I'll deal with it it's not the end of the world but it's less than ideal and I would rather not have to repaint that much of the original painting it presents a problem for me as a conservator and for my client who didn't otherwise know that this was the case so I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that there's something underneath that over paint and it was just the hand of an inexperienced person or somebody who got a little paint happy but it is remarkable the change in just removing this surface grime and the old varnish this is a totally different painting and now of course I have to deal with those areas of over paint and so I'm using a gelled solvent and I'm wearing face protection and gloves because I don't want to subject myself to any fumes or any off gassing and it's important that I'm wearing a full-face respirator because my mucous membranes such as my eyes can absorb the vapors from the solvents and so just a simple respirator won't cut it I'm gonna place this solvent on the area of over paint I'm gonna let it sit and try to soften up that over paint and I'll come back with a swab and remove it to see how effective it was now my hopes is that this solvent will take everything off and leave the original paint but unfortunately that's not the case this old oil paint is really really strong it's really really old and so the gelled solvent can't cut through it as effectively as I would like and so what option does that leave me well it's great thing and anybody who's watched some of my videos before probably notices that this is a theme in conservation that there is a lot of scraping be it glue over paint or whatever the case may be we do a lot of manual work on painting surfaces to remove stuff that shouldn't be there and there's no fast way to go about this you can't speed it up you can't industrialize it you have to take it millimeter by millimeter and slowly work your way through and in this case I'm trying to scrape off all of where as much of this over paint as possible to reveal what's underneath and the good thing is that as I'm doing this I'm starting to realize that there really isn't damage underneath this old over paint and that is the original paint is there there's no reason why this top coating of oil paint should be there and removing it reveals the artists original work and that's the best case scenario it's not often the case but in in this situation it's really relieving to know that there is some original paint there and that I'm not gonna have to reinvent this entire painting now I'm not sure if that's gonna hold true throughout the entire painting but where it does it at least lets me know that there's a possibility that all of this darkened discolored over paint was just somebody being sloppy so with as much of that over paint scraped off as safely possible and I'll get back to that in a minute I'm gonna face the painting with kozo and a solvent based adhesive and the reason I'm using a solvent based adhesive as opposed to a fish gelatin or another protein based water-based adhesive is that my initial tests have revealed that the adhesive used to bond the canvas to the hardboard is a rabbit skin glue and that's a water-based adhesive and so if I do need to expose that to any moisture I want to make sure that whatever I used to bond this paper to the face of the painting won't become soft or pliable or reactivate it and if I used a fish gelatin that would be the case and that would be really problematic so I'm gonna be using a scalpel and some palette knives to slowly pry up and break the glue bond between the canvas and the hard board and in this case a I'm really lucky because this glue has just completely failed and it is so dried out and so brittle that it doesn't take much effort to break that bond and remove the canvas from the hardboard now I still want to be careful I don't want to put any unnecessary stress on the canvas or the paint layer so I'm gonna go slowly and I'm gonna use this palette knife I'm gonna slide it under and twist it a little bit just to break that glue joint and as it does as I do I'll slowly lift up this canvas and remove it from the cardboard now I could have easily removed the hard board from the canvas with a router chisels and planes but this is a fairly large canvas and hard board like this is incredibly tough on your tools and so it chews through router bits and plain bahama irons pretty quickly not to mention I made some tests and I discovered that this glue joint is actually pretty weak and so there's not really any pressing reason to big it to break out the power tools and go through all of that labor when I can approach it in a smarter way so as you can see it's coming off fairly easily at this point I'm just slowly lifting the painting off the glue has completely failed and this canvas is coming off nice and easily you can see over there and the right there was a little spot of light coming through and I think that's a little tear that had probably caused this whole painting to be glued to the hard work as I come to the end I'm being extra careful because I don't want this thing to pop off and fly out of my hands and end up on the floor and a million little pieces because well that would be pretty bad and so now with the canvas remove from that hard board I can get to scraping more spraying now I mentioned that this rabbit skin glue had failed and that it's just completely brittle and dried out you can see how easily it's scraped off with a scalpel and I'm just gliding the scalpel along the surface of the canvas I'm really using almost no pressure and I'm just allowing the movement of the blade to break up and lift off this glue layer and I'm only gonna do this in part of the painting and only in the parts where the impasto is relatively minor now this painting was executed on a very very fine canvas and there's quite a bit of texture built up and so if you can imagine if I press on the back of the painting with this blade the impasto is the textural buildup of the paint will create a bulge on the back side and those bulges can catch the blade and cut the canvas so I'm only gonna be using this scalpel in parts of the painting where I know it's smooth enough to do so safely now the scalpel is a really great efficient tool to remove this rabbit skin glue but it's not one that I can use all the time in some cases where the canvas is really thin and there's a lot of impasto I have to use an ultrasonic scaler yes the same type that your dentist uses on you even though you beg them not to now i've dropped the sound out because these tools make a really ear piercing sound that nobody wants to hear maybe your cap but your cat is crazy and from the last video we learned just how crazy they can be now the ultrasonic scaler works by vibrating the tip of this tool at an ultra-high frequency and those vibrations will break up this rabbit skin glue and it this is a really great tool because the tip is rounded it's not sharp it doesn't need a lot of pressure and as long as I keep it moving it'll break up this glue really quite well now I have to keep it moving because those ultrasonic vibrations can create friction which can create heat and if I keep it in one place I can actually burn the canvas and I definitely don't want to do that now this is an incredibly slow process as you can see there's no big tool tip there's no industrialized machine that can do this and it's much slower than the scalpel now I've been using the scalpel for 20-plus years and so I'm really confident with it and I have great control and while it's the tool that I would prefer to use sometimes it's just not the right tool and so having this ultrasonic scaler in my arsenal allows me another Avenue when my preferred method is locked out and so as you can see just gliding it over the surface breaks up that glue really well and what we can see when we remove it is a healthy canvas it's not really much wrong with it in fact as I start to brush away all of this glue that's been removed and there's quite a lot of it I'm getting the picture that this canvas really didn't need to be glued to hard board at all now sometimes canvas is damaged and it does need a supports but this is beautiful canvas and I'm definitely not gonna glue it to a hard board but before I can do anything more with the canvas in terms of its structural support I need to extract any glue residues and flatten the canvas and this is done on the hot table now this rabbit-skin glue is moisture sensitive meaning that any exposure to water or other solvents may soften it and so I can use that to my advantage to extract out of the canvas any remaining residues I can place this painting face-up on a absorbent cotton blotter paper that's been dampened with a release layer I'll wrap the painting with a cotton webbing and then I'll create a mylar sandwich on top of the hot table and extract out the air I'll bring the painting up to temperature I'll adjust the pressure to what I think is going to be appropriate and then I'll let it do its thing now there is no universal guideline on how to do this there's no rulebook or recipe book that tells you what temperature or what pressure to use that's all just learned experience and really so much of what a conservator does is learned on the ground not in universities so now I'm ready to remove the facing and that's done with the solvent that will soften up the adhesive that I use I'll brush it on and then I'll slowly peel it back and hopefully all of the paint is still where it should be and none of its been lost now this painting didn't have a big flaking issue so I'm not really all that concerned but it's always nice to know that no paint has been lost and it may seem almost unnecessary to take this step if the painting didn't have any flaking or its stability wasn't in question but it's always better to be safe than to be sorry and this is only a few dollars worth of material and it only took 10 or 15 minutes so there really isn't a reason why I wouldn't do this step and now I'll remove the excess adhesive with some cotton balls that I've rolled up and bundled and I'm just gliding over the surface picking up the excess residue and sometimes you just got to get down to it and use your hands to rub off that excess adhesive now while the painting is flat I'm going to take this opportunity to do something that's going to pay off later on I'm going to take a two-part silicone and I'm going to use it to create an impression of the paint texture the impasto although I don't know if I'm creating an impression or making an impression I mean I'm not really sure which one I'm doing one thing sure however that when it comes to making a lasting impression a smile and a handshake just doesn't cut it anymore I mean everyone's gonna go right to your website to see what you're really about and if your websites an old clunker that doesn't work and doesn't look good well that's gonna reflect poorly on you and that's even more important if you're creative we're showcasing your work is of paramount importance so go to Squarespace com where with a few clicks you can set up a really beautiful online portfolio where you can pull your images in from Twitter Foursquare Instagram Flickr and other sites and if you want to sell your art online Squarespace has an e-commerce platform that supports the way you do business so head over to Squarespace comm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and leave an impression that's as awesome as you are all right websites have been built impressions have been left everything is hunky-dory and says I peel back this silicone we can see that I've now created a kind of a texture map of the artists original brushwork and that's really great because there are places on this painting where the artists original paint has been lost and will need to be filled in and there are plenty of ways that I can create texture that would otherwise disguise and blend in and the naked eye wouldn't see it but if I have the opportunity to use the artist's actual brushwork why not I mean yes it may not be what was here originally and we'll never know but it's better than me just guessing so I can add some release powder onto this fill in medium which is just gonna facilitate the medium not sticking to the silicon and I can press this silicone mold into it and if everything works and fingers crossed when I peel it up I should have a textural impression from another part of the painting reflecting the artists own brushwork and now I can turn my attention to the structural issues with the painting and luckily those are very few there's just a small tear and the issue of the missing tacking edges now for this tear I would normally use bridging which is my preferred method for addressing tears but because this canvas is really really really thin I don't want to add the bridging material onto the back because I'm concerned that it might Telegraph to the front so I'm using an adhesive film and then I'm gonna be using a piece of silk organza just to hold this little separation together and there's a lot of old oil paint that's inside that little tear inside the gap that I wasn't able to remove safely so that tear isn't going to open up and this is really just a precautionary measure to hold it flat and to make sure that if the canvas moves expands and contracts during humidity changes that this doesn't open up and fit and manifests itself on the front so I'll use some heat and I'll activate the adhesive and then it dries really quickly I can just press it with my fingers and there we go that's all stabilized now this painting had its original tacking edges cut off when they glued it to the hard board my guess is that they just sliced them right off and said we don't need these well I need them because I'm gonna be putting this painting back onto a stretcher and so I'm gonna be using Belgium linen and I'm also gonna be using silk organza no you may ask why am i using both when I could just be using the Belgian linen to add a tacking edge well this canvas is very very thin and I'm concerned that the Belgian linen which is probably twice the thickness of this canvas is going to leave an impression on the front in addition the edges of this painting are pretty weak that's where the paint has been lost and I suspect there may have been some water damage in the past so I'm using this silk organza and the adhesive film to reinforce about an inch and a half along the tacking edge area and this is done just so that I have a little bit more fidelity in this part of the canvas before I add the tacking edge now the tacking edge will pull on the canvas when I stretch it and I want to make sure that it's pulling on the strongest part that if I don't want to adhere it to a week in canvas and then put some tension on it and have the canvas tear so by doing this double method I can ensure that when this linen is pulled taut its pulling on the silk organza which is distributing that tension across a larger surface area than just the linen itself it seems overkill it seems are done in but again better safe than sorry and before I go to stretch the painting I'm going to take advantage of it being flat on the table to remove any of the excess fill in material and you remember that when I fill in any areas of losses I over fill because it's fast it's efficient and because I can remove the excess later on but that's really an important step because anywhere that there's the original paint and keep the original paint and I don't want it to be covered up with retouching medium or with fill-in so I'll take a swab that's moistened with solvent and water and I will expose the fill and medium to that and just lift it up now because this painting didn't have a stretcher I had to have one custom-made and this is a stretcher that's made of sugar pine which is a fast growing straight grain pine that's sustainably harvested and as important because I'd like to be a good steward of the environment as best I can and also because it's fast growing and straight grained it has an even moisture content and when it's kiln dried it stays very straight I don't want a stretcher that's gonna twist and turn and distort and so I'll take the painting I'll place it on the stretcher I'll square it up I'll figure out where it needs to go and then I'll start tacking it and I always start tacking from the center out because it affords me the opportunity to create a triangle or daimond of tension in the middle of the painting and then to remove any excess slack to the corners where it's much much more easily managed now there's a plenty debate about what's the right way to stretch and the wrong way to stretch and you know that's kind of up to the individual who's doing the stretching and this is the way that I prefer to do it because this is the way that I feel I get the best results other people may have different perspectives and that's certainly okay there's not one right way to skin a cat so using my magnetic hammer and sterilized steel upholstery tacks I'll just drive them in using the pulling pliers to create even tension and make sure that this painting is well secured to the stretcher and when I'm done doing that I will take care of the excess canvas on the back I'm using smaller tacks I'll fold the canvas under and tack it along the back of the stretcher just to make sure that it's nice and tidy and again this doesn't really add much structural support although there is an argument to be made that any more tax will help distribute the pressure of attention it looks good and I like that now before I do any retouching I'm going to apply a layer of synthetic resin and often I call this an isolation layer but it's not really to isolate anything because I used this same resin in my retouching paints and it's all fully reversible so it's not really designed to isolate sometimes I'll use this to simulate what the painting will look like after final varnish is applied so that I can make sure my colors match but in this case because there is so much film and material so many areas of retouching I want to make sure that they don't absorb the retouching paint too much and that is dry draw out any of those resins and create an overly matte or overly glossy area so that resin layer helps unify the base for the retouching now I'm going to be doing a little bit different than I normally do I'm starting off with a big old brush normally you see me start off with a very very tiny brush and use lots of little brush strokes and little dots to reintegrate the losses but here I'm going big I brought out the big guns and frankly that's just because there's a lot of area to retouch and it wouldn't necessarily make sense to start off with a very small brush now I know you're thinking that I'm gonna lose some precision and I'm gonna be sloppy well I'm actually going to not go all the way to the edge I'm gonna leave a little border of unretouched area when I come up to some of the original paint and really what I'm doing here is just trying to lay down some base color efficiently and quickly so that I can get to that smaller brush and the reason that I leave that area when I come up next to some of the original is because as I get closer and closer to matching the colors it's gonna get harder and harder to see where I've retouched and where is original and so if I leave this little border I'll know what's my work and what's the artists original work and this is a fairly easy area to retouch because it's really loosely painted and I can go about it pretty loosely it's not an area of great detail and it isn't a terribly complex series of colors to mix in fact this is one of those odd cases where I have to be a little bit looser and consciously try to be less controlling because it achieves an effect that better blends into the original painting and once I'm satisfied with the base color that I've laid down I'll switch to a smaller brush and I'll start to fill in that little gap that I left between the retouching and the original paint and as you can see once I start do that it blends in pretty well and it disappears pretty quickly now I'll still come back to this later on after I've had a little time away from it and take a second pass and just make sure that I'm satisfied with the colors with the brushstrokes and just with how everything is reintegrating but not bad for a first shot and maybe twenty-five thirty minutes worth of retouching now again this is a pretty easy area to retouch it's not all that complicated and like I said it actually took some discipline to be a little bit looser and to be a little bit more freewheeling here which is something that has a conservator you generally don't get to do all that often so it's a nice change of pace but ultimately the goal is the same to make the damage disappear to reunify the image so that we can appreciate it as a whole and not see the damage and not have it disturb our ability to enjoy the painting as the artist wanted us to appreciate it and there are lots of areas throughout the painting that are going to require this same treatment pretty much all along the edges where there was massive paint losses and I would film those and show you them but we're already at 30 some odd minutes and hopefully some of you are still awake and I fear that if I continue just to show retouching you won't be and so I can start to move on to other areas of the painting that are a little bit more tricky and one of those areas is the signature now we can see that there has been some loss and then around and on the signature and I know the artist is Henry Ranger now I can't quite make out what this signature set says I don't know if it says Ranger or Henry or HR Ranger or whatever the case may be and it's not really up to me to determine that the problem here is that there are losses throughout the signature and I have to make a decision about what I'm going to retouch and how that's going to be balanced ethically so one thing that I will not do is reinforce enhance or complete this signature and the reason that I don't do that is because when this painting is black let all of my work all of my retouching will glow and I don't want to create a situation whereby a prospective client looks at this painting and says wait a minute why is the signature fluorescing what's going on here is this an authentic painting any time the signature fluoresce is it instantly casts doubt about the authenticity of the painting even if it's an authentic painting it raises that question and that complicates the equation for an auction house for a dealer for a gallerist even for a private client looking to sell the painting and one of my responsibilities to my clients aside from making their paintings stable and making them look like the artist wanted is to not do anything that would complicate the existence of the painting in the future and whether that be at a sale whether that be at a submission for a catalog resume whatever and so by filling in that signature that would be a problem so I'm just going to disguise this damage away so that we can't really even see it and then I'm gonna leave the signature alone and so with all of my retouching completed it's on to varnishing and for this painting I'm gonna be applying the varnish using an HVLP system a spray system and I'm doing that because I want to get a satin effect and I think I can achieve that better for this painting by spraying it rather than brushing and that's just again something that you learned by doing this thousands of times you kind of get a sense of what type of varnish and what type of application is going to work best for any given painting so once I have achieved good coverage we can take a look at the painting as it came into the studio really brown and yellow a ton of surface grime a ton of over painting all over the edges and kind of a lousy looking painting but with all of that surface grime all that old varnish all that over painting removed the losses reintegrated is it pretty stunning painting and one that much more accurately reflects what Henry Ranger wanted us to see thanks for watching go ahead and subscribe and stay tuned for more

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 1,598,884

Rating: 4.9686465 out of 5

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

Id: uFGLpt_r90E

Length: 37min 21sec (2241 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/fuckwpshit]

Most of the stuff he does I can grasp from a scientific or practical viewpoint.

When he (or any skilled conservator) does retouching, though ... to me that’s like black magic.

Here I am (a guy who can hardly draw a straight line with a ruler) and I’m watching master craftsmen making entire holes in a painting just vanish like they weren’t there.

I just wish more of his customers would allow photos of the work when it’s back in their possession. Especially the ones who have the naughty cats :-)

[u/Bobgoulet]

Love his videos. Very informative and relaxing.

[u/weenie2323]

I love this channel, I use it to de-stress.

[u/[deleted]]

i do enjoy the youtube following and the banter in the comments section.

[u/ItsNotBinary]

I love this, but I've followed the conservation of the Ghent altarpiece from closeby and even though he does an awesome job, the level of care is clearly more commercial oriented than when they work on the historical masterpieces.

[u/SabinedeJarny]

Excellent. Thank you for sharing.

[u/sabre_rider]

Destressing aside, this man is a Master of his craft.

[u/Mort1969]

Wow so beautiful- I just love watching these transformations

[u/dogmomdrinkstea]

Incredibly beautiful. Such a calming video during quarantine.