Completely Different, Completely the Same

this video is brought to you by magellan tv a new documentary streaming service founded by filmmakers whose mission is to tell great stories that have defined the human experience [Music] well this looks interesting it doesn't appear to look like any of the other works i've worked on it's not a portrait or a landscape certainly not a still life in fact it doesn't appear to have any narrative image it's abstract which makes it fundamentally different but it is still paint on canvas stretch drawn to wood support so it's really the same it has holes some small some not so small the paint layer is flaking and it's really really really dirty so working on it should be just the same as any other painting right but the paint is really thick the impasto is heavy so that's going to require a different approach or maybe a different set of materials or a whole different way of thinking whether it's the same or different or a little bit of both it's here and now i've got to figure out what to do with it and while this painting is the same but it is also different and that difference both in terms of content and approach to working makes it interesting i mean the same thing all the time would be really boring and so before i get started i want to tell you about magellan tv a place that's different see magellan is a new type of documentary streaming service founded by filmmakers and as a result they have the most varied content available anywhere history technology war biography arts and culture just about everything they have over three thousand documentaries to choose from you can watch it anywhere tv smartphone any device and best of all no ads no commercial interruptions so you can fall deep into the content and deep i fell into precision the measure of all things a wild and expansive journey from painting caves to the exploration of outer space the series looks at how we developed the seven international units of measurement for time length mass brightness current temperature and the measure of atoms and how those have shaped the course of history now originally magellan was going to offer one free month but they've upped the game for my viewers to 30 off an annual membership that means you get over 3 000 ad free documentaries for less than 350 a month and this offer is available to people that have let their subscriptions lapse which is ridiculously kind and kind of amazing head over to try.magellantv.com baumgartnerrestoration or click the link in the description below to take advantage of this offer and try something different now the first thing that i need to do for this painting and generally every painting that i work on is remove the canvas from the stretcher and so i'll grab a whole bunch of nifty tools that i have pliers screwdrivers staple pullers tack pullers and this painting has been secured to the canvas by the artist with staples i have talked at great length about why i dislike staples it is not simply because they are difficult to remove and because i feel that they are an inferior method of attaching canvas to wood but it is also because of the damage they do when i remove this staple take a look not only are there two holes but the bar itself cuts into the canvas and now that area needs to be reinforced so there doesn't appear to be any good reason to use staples now i did mention that they're kind of a pain to remove i have this nifty staple puller which makes my life somewhat easier but you can see on my face that my frustration with staples is kind of an existential one i don't know that i will ever get over it i'm working on it though trust me now with all of the staples removed i can flip over the painting and start to remove the stretcher from the canvas and this is a big canvas which is why i choose to remove the stretcher from it rather than it from the stretcher it also affords me the opportunity to make sure that there are no errant staples that i have missed that are still holding onto the canvas that would otherwise cause a deformation when i do lift this stretcher off now over time any painting that sits anywhere even inside of a home will accumulate dust dirt gunk and grime between the stretcher bar and the canvas and i choose to use a simple bristle brush to remove it rather than a vacuum because the suction of a vacuum could grab onto that canvas and crinkle it or distort it now whenever i move a big canvas i have to be careful because well it's big and i have found that swift decisive actions are the best way to go and so when i drop this canvas down it may look sloppy but the cushion of air escaping from under the weight of the canvas as it falls pads it now this puncture here is quite distorted and before i do anything to the painting i want to press it flat now this painting has a lot of impasto so i'm putting some felt and some siliconized release paper down on the face of the painting i'm dampening up a piece of cotton blotter paper and i'm just going to press it onto the surface of the canvas i'm going to add a second dry blotter paper to help the absorption of the water a piece of copper to distribute the pressure evenly and then to medium weight weights i don't want to press too hard just enough so that over a couple of days as the pressure and the moisture do their work they flatten out the canvas and this is not the final step but it's essential to working with this canvas in the future again swift actions being confident where i'm moving and also how i'm handling the canvas are pretty critical i'm going to flip the canvas over now so that i have the face up so i can start the cleaning process and for this canvas i'm going to be using an enzyme cleaner i've made some tests and i've found that this is actually the most appropriate solution for this painting every painting has a different accumulation of surface grime and because no two are alike sometimes we have to use different methods of cleaning and because this painting has a heavy impasto that is the built up texture of the paint i'm not going to go right off with a rolled cotton swab because that cotton swab as i'm putting pressure on it could catch on some of that delicate impasto and break it so i'm using a bristle brush dipped into the enzyme cleaning solution and i'm just going to agitate this surface grime loose now this paint layer is fairly stable so i don't have to worry about the agitation and once the bristle brush has loosened it up i can come back with that rolled cotton swab and just pick up that grime i'm not using much pressure here i'm just using it as an effectively a sponge just to pick up that solution and you can see just in this one small area how dirty this painting is it's a vibrant painting or well underneath all of this grime it is a vibrant painting or i should say once all of this grime is removed it will be a vibrant painting and slow and steady wins the race here i can't simply pour this over the entire painting and go with a big sponge and remove it it takes a long time and part of the reason it takes a long time is because of that textural impasto i just have to be careful because if i break any of that off well not only is it more work for me to return it back to the painting but it's totally avoidable and that would be an unforced error and as we get a better look at the textual buildup of paint the impasto we can see why using this bristle brush is a really effective method of agitating this surface grime loose it gets into all of those little nooks and crannies into those little crevices underneath the overhangs it does a really good job of finding all of that grime and making it detach from the surface of the painting now there are many different tools that could be used here i have used toothbrushes i have used nylon brushes but a small bristle brush seems to be the tool that is most effective while still being really delicate and then once all of this surface grime has been agitated loose i can come back again with that rolled cotton ball on that stick and just pick up all of that surface grime i'm not really using much pressure here i don't need to because everything has been agitated loose and the cotton is going to absorb all of that moisture naturally it doesn't need much additional effort now cleaning paintings with a heavy impasto does take more time it is more difficult only in that it takes more attention it's nothing that you can do mindlessly and that's not to say that cleaning a painting is ever mindless but once you get into a rhythm you know your materials you know the grime or the varnish you're removing it can become formulaic and repetitive and that's actually good because it keeps consistency but with a heavily imposted painting every square inch must require more focus because you're dealing with effectively a sculpture a three-dimensional object and you have to think in 3d terms not just on the surface but in and around all of that texture so while it is still cleaning a painting it's just a little different than a flat one now because this painting had several planar distortions or bumps and dents and waves in english i'm gonna have to do a treatment to remove those and that is executed on my hot table on top of an absorbent cotton blotter paper but the thing that i'm doing differently here is all about protecting that textural paint so i'm laying down a piece of siliconized pet film and on top of that i'm rolling out some felt and this is going to provide a cushion that will protect the delicate paint layer from the downward pressure from the vacuum pump but also allow that downward pressure to conform to that uneven surface because if i didn't do this the pressure wouldn't be consistent that is the film would not be in contact with the entire painting surface the areas that are high would prevent the surrounding areas from making contact with the mylar and then that would potentially leave an area that doesn't have downward pressure so with the vacuum extraction tubes installed i can turn on the hot table and turn on the vacuum pump and the vacuum pump can exert oh about 30 mercury inches of pressure which is quite a lot enough in fact to crush that impasto so i'm going to lower that pressure down to about 0 5 or so mercury inches which is enough to get it flat but not so much that it's going to crush the paint layer and here we can see how that felt is conforming to that texture now once the canvas has been brought up to temperature allowed to cool and transferred over to another table where it's pressed under weights for a few days it can come out and i'll remove the cotton blotter paper i'll remove the felt and the mylar and we can see that that texture has been preserved which is precisely what we were going for now i don't need to line this canvas to address this tear that is a solution but it's not one that i favor it's much like putting the whole arm into a cast because of a broken pinky yes it solves the problem but it's just a little excessive when a smaller lighter solution would be appropriate because this tear was pretty gnarly and there are areas where there are no canvas fibers left i have to create an inlay to fill this gap and the inlay is important not only because it helps aid in the structural repair but it also makes sure that the fill-in medium has something to stick to if i didn't do this it would be much harder to add the fill and medium and do the retouching later on so i've chosen a piece of canvas from my old canvas stock that matches the color the weight and the weave i've traced it to fit this area and now i'm just placing it oh ever so carefully into its new location now the process of bridging is one whereby threads from a canvas are dipped in an adhesive and then laid down across the open wound perpendicularly much like sutures well not really because these pieces of bridging threat strands don't actually penetrate into the canvas so these are maybe more akin to butterfly closures they sit on the surface and they hold the wound closed they prevent it from opening up now this canvas is not going to be under such tension that this wound or this tear is going to open up and run but if i don't take corrective action it will start to move with humidity changes and while it looks like these strands of belgian linen are kind of flimsy i mean they are they're really thin even though this is belgian linen which is incredibly strong no one of these strands can do much on its own to support this canvas but by using many of them laid down across this tear once the adhesive dries this will be secure it will take a tremendous amount of force to open up this tear and i've conducted experiments on scrap canvases to see just how strong this is and it is remarkably strong i am always surprised at how much force i need to use to pull apart bridging and at no point is this canvas going to be under that tension this is really just to make sure that this area is immobilized to a degree so that it doesn't wreak havoc on the fill-in and the retouching the last thing we want is for that fill-in to crack and for it to flake off and for the retouching to no longer be stable so that's really the function of bridging just to hold this canvas in place and secure it so that it's a stable foundation onto which i can fill in and then retouch and this process can be a little tedious thankfully this is a relatively small tear and i would say that this took about a half an hour maybe a little bit longer to execute certainly if it was an exponentially larger tear it would take much longer but i would probably break it up into several sections so that i didn't lose my mind and that my back and neck didn't lose theirs because being hunched over a painting like this for several hours can be taxing not only physically but emotionally and intellectually now with that bridging completed well almost completed i have to press it because i have introduced a moisture to the canvas in the form of the adhesive and if i don't press it as the adhesive dries it's going to distort so i'll flip the canvas over i will place underneath the canvas a piece of siliconized pet film so that the adhesive doesn't stick to anything i.e my table i will place the same film on the surface of the painting and then i'll place a couple layers of felt again to cushion the weight to evenly distribute it and to allow the weight to conform to the painting surface a few days later after changing out the weights and the padding i can remove the felt and see that this has been all secured and it looks great well almost it still needs some work but i can move on to another procedure right now i will transfer the canvas over to my taller table where i prefer to do most of my working and i will begin reinforcing this canvas now i mentioned that those staples did a number on the canvas and so i need to take corrective action to make sure that when i go ahead and secure it to the stretcher the tacks don't pull through and the canvas doesn't rip so i'm going to turn to my bin of scraps of adhesive and silk organza and pull out some and begin applying them to the canvas now this is a heat activated thermoplastic adhesive which is just fancy for you can iron it on and that's simply what i'm doing i'm going to iron on these strips of adhesive film and then once they are cool i'm going to remove the top layer of release film and what will be left is just a layer of adhesive and once i have all of the release film removed i can lay down the silk organza and begin embedding it into the adhesive now silkorganza is effectively like an industrial diamond to a show diamond it's still silk but it's not your fancy delicate showy silk this is the workhorse of silk it is incredibly strong and incredibly thin which is exactly what i want i want to add structural support to this canvas without adding bulk or mass and as i move along i take my handled weight with an oak clapper underneath it to absorb any moisture as it cools now one thing that makes filling in the losses on this painting a little different is texture all of that impasto it's what makes the painting really beautiful but it's more difficult you see simply putting down a thin smooth layer of fill-in material wouldn't cut it because even though i can match color the texture would give the area away so after laying down that fill-in i can start to add texture and there's no one way of doing this it's really whatever works and because there are some fine brush strokes here i'm using a fan brush to mimic them i can go back and forth until i've got the texture just right and there's really no other way to mimic fine brush work than with fine brush work now in the areas where there is a thicker impasto i can use my palette knife to build up this fill in medium and then slowly sculpt it to match the surrounding area that's missing and here i'm just trying to create this little lip from the brush when the paint was applied if i don't create this lip this area is going to look kind of goofy so i just need to make sure that it follows the contours of the existing paint and that it matches in height and shape and this isn't terribly difficult you can see it's not rocket science here but it's really important because if it's not there somebody will notice it and that's precisely what i don't want to happen so matching it makes a big difference even if it's easy there are other areas where the paint has been chipped and lost and again i can just go through find all of these areas and work to create that missing sculptural element and the only thing that's difficult on this painting is that there is a lot of action going on and so finding all of these little areas can sometimes be really difficult it's not so obvious where they are so making multiple passes going over the painting several times allows me to catch areas that i may have missed another thing that's kind of difficult is that many of these pieces of structural impasto were made fluidly they weren't contrived by the artist it just kind of happened as they were painting them and so recreating that fluidity in a contrived manner can sometimes be tricky so once i've laid down that first layer i will go back with some dental tools and then shape it as necessary just to make sure that it has the momentum the feeling the action of the paint being applied and not something that looks like it was carved or replicated even though that's precisely what i'm doing this is always kind of a nice departure for me while i do work on all sorts of paintings the overwhelming number have relatively minimal impasto mostly modern or contemporary pieces have a lot of brushwork and and heavy beautiful thick impasto and because those are just younger paintings they don't need as much conservation but every once in a while when one does come in with a big thick heavy impasto it's kind of fun because i get to use a different skill set and different tools and a different way of thinking which keeps it interesting doing the same thing over and over again can be boring even if it is fluid and swift it's nice to have something that changes up the pace or the rhythm of work now once all of that fill and medium has dried i'll come back with a cotton swab and start to remove the excess as always i'm just looking to fill in the area where the paint is lost and i may need to come back later on and re-sculpt the area if i feel like it doesn't match i'm looking to match perfectly to fill in and blend in without any giveaway so it may take a couple of passes and now the painting can be stretched to the support but after looking at that support i decided that it really needed some additional work it's a big painting and the artist added some crossbars to help support those big spans but those crossbars were kind of sloppy the lumber was twisted and distorted and they were secured directly to the stretcher rendering it a strainer and removing the ability to key it out and add tension so i thought i could do better now whenever i decide to rework a stretcher i always have to factor in the additional cost of the time it takes to do this and when i had to do all of this with hand tools it took much more time so it was maybe a more favorable comparison to simply buying a new support but now that i have a shop that allows me to do this work in a fraction of the time i don't really see the benefit to scrapping a support particularly if i can salvage it and make it adequate now sometimes the support is just too far gone and it needs to be scrapped in which case it's usually obvious but if i can save part of the original i don't see any reason why not to i mean that is part and parcel of what it means to be a conservator to conserve so with a little bit of effort i have fabricated some crossbars and then i need to make sure that i can key them out because that is one thing that will make them a value-added proposition compared to the artist's original the ability to add tension to the entire canvas through the stretcher and through the crossbars themselves makes this different than what the artist did so i need to find a way to add keys to these crossbars and to allow them to not only remain affixed to the stretcher but to move when the stretcher is keyed out so i'll create some slots for the keys create a bevel for the keys to rest in and a groove which well you'll see in a minute and nobody's favorite thing is sanding so we'll just get right through this and be done with it see painless and unlike the artist original i am going to secure these together with a couple of hidden screws this makes sure that they don't flop around or come loose and it allows better support for the canvas now before i can add my crossbars i have to remove the artist's originals and you'll see that these are just affixed directly to the support and it takes a little bit of work to pry these nails off they are really really stubborn the heads are embedded into the wood and holding on really really well and they're holding on really well because they're not nails they're screws good job julian work smarter not harder right well lesson learned and so with the twist of a wrist these screws will come out but these screws really do prevent this from being a proper stretcher and so i'm not going to use this method of attaching my crossbars to the original support in addition the artist added staples at the corners thus making it even more difficult to key this stretcher out now to the artist's credit there were no keys here and i'm sure the artist didn't care at all about the future stretching ability of this support they were probably just looking for something that would hold onto the canvas so that they could get to painting artists are great at making art they're not necessarily great at building art and there is a difference so with the stretcher squared up the old support removed i can now install mine and get it into place and the key difference here is the way that i'm going to be affixing mine to the original because it does need to be a fix it can't just float i can't glue it in place or nail it in place or screw it in place unless i can i can use a screw with little washer in that slot that i cut and what this will allow is when this screw is loosened up as is here the keys can go in can expand the support and then i can come back later on and tighten these screws so it allows me to have this crossbar system attached to the support while still remaining flexible and that's absolutely critical now unlike a small painting where we really don't have to worry too much about the slack and the tension on a canvas with a big painting and this is not a gigantic painting but it is pretty big we do and so it is even more critical that we get the center of the painting as taut as possible without adding tension through the keys and that starts by adding a couple of tacks in the center of each edge and making sure that when i do i pull that canvas taut i want to create a nice tight center of the canvas because i can't go and add tension later on yes i can key the canvas out through the keys and the stretcher support but it's going to be less effective in the center of the canvas than it is towards the corners so this is a really critical step and if i louse this up well i might have to undo all the tacking and start over luckily for me i have tacked thousands of paintings so i have a pretty good feel of what i need to do here now once i've gotten that center tight i can flip the painting on its edge and begin tacking from center out now this painting isn't resting directly on the floor it's on a couple of foam pads because i don't want the painting directly on the floor the foam will also help absorb some of the vibration from the hammer and give a little cushion and so working from center out on all of the edges the painting will be affixed it will have nice even tension and then i can go on to tidying up the back because this painting has impasto i want to take some precautionary measures so that none of it's damaged this would be a really bad point to damage the impasto of the painting right as i'm about to finish the stretching so i'm going to lay down some felt and again some mylar so that the felt doesn't stick to the painting because that felt can grab onto some of that impasto and then lay the painting face down i'm gonna use little small tacks to secure the excess canvas to the back of the stretcher and this is why i want to have that felt because i am hammering here and that felt is going to absorb the blows and make sure that the impasto doesn't get crushed while i'm doing this and this isn't necessary the tax that is but it's something i like to do because i don't like this extra canvas flopping around and now on to keying and here you can see precisely why i spent so much time working on this crossbar so with some new keys because of course there weren't any i can slide them in and then tap them out and you can see the crossbar stays in place while tension is added and here in the corner you can see the stretcher open up and that means that the canvas is getting tighter and with all of the keys in place i can put some tacks next to each set of keys which will hold them in place with fishing line but before i do any of that i want to make sure that this crossbar is secure so i will tighten down those screws and make sure that it is locked into place i can always loosen them up if i need to add more tension and of course adding this fishing line holds these keys in place so they don't get lost and look at that i can do it with one hand it's pretty impressive and now on to varnishing i know you're thinking i haven't done any retouching so why would i be varnishing well this is one of those cases where laying down an isolation layer isn't just about color matching yes it will help but in this case it is really about protecting this layer of paint because i've made some tests and the solvents used to remove the retouching well they can be damaging to this delicate layer of paint so i'm laying down a varnish layer to protect now this varnish is removable with a different solvent one that i've tested and one that poses no harm to the painting so what we have is a layer of varnish that is going to protect the painting that can be removed with a solvent that doesn't harm the painting from the retouching paints that need to be removed with a solvent that can harm the painting so this is about protecting this is a true isolation layer and after that varnish has dried for a couple of hours i can move on to the actual retouching process and retouching a painting like this is really different than a regular painting actually it's not i mean it's still about matching color and about applying paint and matching brushwork the real difference here is that there is no clear narrative content there's no set of berries that need to be recreated there isn't a tear in the face that needs to go away there's not a sky with a big hole in it this is really about color about brush work about momentum and about energy and i know what you're thinking just get some white add some red put some gray in it make it a little dirty and muddy smear it up and then slap it on the canvas and nobody will ever know the difference yeah except when you do that everybody knows the difference because it screams out as an imposter and so it may seem simple with so much activity going on on the painting to do an easier faster less critical job but the irony is that when you do that for some reason it jumps out at the eye and maybe this has to do with the fact that when there is a narrative on the painting you know a story to tell a bunch of cows a beautiful sunset we end up looking at the scene but when the painting is largely abstract our eye starts to wander through the execution of the painting we start to look at the colors we start to look at the shapes and the forms we start to actually study the brush work and learn how it was applied what does that tell us about the artist's working technique what does that tell us about the moment that this painting was created and so to some degree because there's nothing to focus on we focus on everything i had a professor in college once tell me about abstraction he said abstraction is difficult and it looks really easy and if you're a viewer and you go up to a painting and it's a narrative painting and you look at it and you can't derive from it some value well then maybe there's no value in the painting itself but if you go up to an abstract painting and you can't derive from it some value well maybe there's no value in you maybe the missing part is in you because abstraction requires both the artist to create something a space and the viewer to give into that space to participate in the creation of the content and that's the great trick of abstraction and maybe it seems like a cop-out to pass the buck off to the viewer to say well you figure out what it's actually about or maybe it's faith and trust faith and trust that the viewer themselves will bring their life their story their history their existence to this work that the artist trusts the viewer to help complete the work to be a participant in the life of this work and in that respect to some degree abstraction is a more unique experience of looking than one where the narrative is simply defined for you looking at an abstract painting you can see and feel just about everything and everybody will take away something slightly different but a still life is a still life and a peach is a peach and a sunset is a sunset and a cow as a cow there's very little room for interpretation and so to some degree abstraction requires the artist to trust the viewer and the viewer to take up some responsibility it's kind of a tango it takes two and with the retouching now complete i can go on to the final coat of varnish the sheen on this painting from the first varnish layer is way too shiny so i need to knock it down a bit and to do that i'm using my hvlp system because if i brush on the same layer of varnish it's going to disturb the original coating and it's going to cause the retouching to get all mushy and messy so i'll just go over the painting a couple of times with a more matte varnish and my spray system and then let it dry and my work will be all done so a painting is a painting as a painting right well yeah kind of but every painting is a little different and requires a unique approach and so even executing the same technique may require a different route to get there and understanding those differences really is the expertise of a seasoned conservator and so while this painting really didn't have any new and crazy techniques how they were applied really did make all the difference and a difference it did make from the back and a modified support to better handle the weight of this canvas to the front and well a pretty intense change i think the difference was worth it you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 657,094

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: TQJ9C5IkNpM

Length: 38min 41sec (2321 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021