Ex Multis Ad Unum - Restoring A Split Painting - Narrated

so for this video I'm not going to do a step-by-step walkthrough of the work that I'm doing on this painting but rather I'm going to try to address some of the questions that you guys had had posted in my comment section on the video on YouTube and by far the number one question was what happened to this painting unfortunately I don't have a comprehensive story about this painting I can only relay what the client the owner of the painting shared with me and the owner of the painting is a dealer who many many years ago received this painting on consignment from a client and at that point the painting was split but not into four pieces I believe it was split into two pieces and the client declined to go ahead with the conservation at that time and left the painting with the dealer the dealer sat on the painting for many years not knowing what to do with it and then finally contacted me and inquired about having the piece conserved I provided the proposal and the dealer decided to go ahead at some point you probably gather the painting split into four pieces and that was probably the result of mishandling or packing and storing or moving around all the dealers and though the dealer did not own up to that anyhow I don't have much information on who the artist was or when or where it was painted again I can only relay what information was provided to me and the dealer said that the client had received the painting from a relative who had been traveling in Italy in their youth so as best we know the painting was Italian and based on the timeline that the owner provided we can assume that the painting was at least from the early 1800s though again some of this stuff is hearsay or speculation and who really ever knows if the client is accurate or even telling the truth nonetheless that stuff isn't really all that important to me as my job is focused on making the painting whole again now another question that a lot of people asked was was I intimidated by this piece or shocked or overwhelmed and was I given pause at any point generally no I mean I've seen quite a few paintings in the past 20 so odd years and while this one was exceptionally bad it didn't really differ from anything I hadn't done in the past before now of course the devil is always in the details in determining what the best approach is and how best to get there is always dependent upon the materials that the artist used and that the previous conservator is used and that leads me right into this next set of questions about why I put a facing on the painting and if you see my videos you know that facing the painting with Japanese mulberry paper or washi kozo is important for a couple of reasons one it protects the painting from handling from moving around and sliding on the surface of my table and my fingerprints and other wear and tear that may damage the paint film it also makes sure that if for some reason any paint becomes detached from the canvas it's not lost it will be held in place by that Japanese paper and when I remove that paper I can secure that paint back down now I also received a bunch of questions relating to the removal of this adhesive from the back of the canvas and why it appeared that I was being so aggressive and using a stiff nylon brush and a scalpel this was a rabbit skin glue backing but mixed in with that rabbit skin and glue was either rosin or damar resin and much like baking everybody has a basic recipe for their cakes but everybody throws in something different that's their secret ingredients and in this case I suspect that there was some turpentine and rosin mixed in with the rabbit skin glue when it was hot and that was probably done to stiffen it up to make the rabbit skin glue much more rigid and hold the canvas flat of course I have to remove all this stuff because it will interfere with all of the procedures that I plan to do in the future to both stabilize and put the painting back together now bunch of people asked what I do with all of this grime and gunk that I scrape off do I send it to a laboratory for testing do I save it I don't save it it's garbage and it goes into the garbage and with respect to sending it to a laboratory it would be novel to see what it is but I've been doing this long enough that I can tell what many of these substances are and so it's it's not necessary to go through the added expense and time and frankly hassle of having it tested just to see that I was correct or 90% correct if ever I run into a situation where I don't know what the substance is then I may set it off to a lab to get a better read on it but like I said in this case I was fairly confident that it was rabbit skin glue with a rosin or damar resin mixed inside and so I didn't need to have that concrete proof and with respect to being aggressive I know it looks like I'm being really aggressive with this scalpel and then I'm really abrading the back of the canvas but you got to keep in mind that I've been doing this for a very long time and so I'm really comfortable with using the scalpel and moderating the pressure and how I use the blade that said this adhesive was really thick and really stubborn so it needed a bit more elbow grease a bit more muscle to get it off and ultimately I knew that this painting was going to be lines to a new canvas so well it's never once intention to cause harm or stress on the original canvas because this piece had been split into four sections there was no way that we could put the painting back together without lining it to a new canvas and so having that knowledge understanding that a new canvas is going to be put on the verso of the original and you've had more support and stability we can accept that if the original canvas is weakened at all it's again not desired but it's okay because we're going to be buttressing it with a new line in canvas and so while I'm done with the scraping I still need to desaturate that canvas from the adhesive because when that he said was put on the back of the canvas the canvas was accepting and porous and so that adhesive penetrated in so I'm using a solvent mixture here which is going to slowly soften up that adhesive mixture that was put on the canvas and I'm going to be using my hot to extract all of the residues out of the canvas so a lot of questions were asked about what my hot table or what my vacuum table is used for and really it's used for a ton of different things it's kind of the heart of the conservation studio much like the stove is the heart of a kitchen or the table saw the heart of a woodshop and it's a big aluminum table if it heats up and it has vacuum ports in the corners and what it allows me to do is apply even heat and pressure to a painting and in this case the combination of the solvent and the heat is gonna soften up that adhesive and the pressure is gonna force that adhesive down into the absorbent blotter paper which is that white sheet underneath the canvas and when everything is said and done sometimes I have to do this process two or three times all of that adhesive that was applied to the back of the painting will be removed so now a lot of you asked why I was removing the washi kozo at this stage because later on I'm gonna add some more along the cracks well at this stage I need to remove this washi kozo so that I can start thinking about stabilizing and transferring to paint the painting onto a new line in canvas I need to remove this because it's going to interfere with the lining process because the adhesive that I used to stabilize and face this painting is a heat sensitive adhesive when I do the lining which is a process whereby heat is required this adhesive will also become vulnerable and I don't want that to happen so it's easier for me to remove this washed kozo and discard it and then proceed on with the next steps if you asked why I used two layers of washi kozo and it's really just because I wanted extra protection and to make sure that there was no chance that the single layer could tear those paintings into four pieces and I just wanted to make sure that it didn't end up in five or six pieces there were questions about the removal of the wash go zone and why I was doing it in one fell swoop and not in small sections or even why I applied it as a single and not in small sections like I had before and there's no hard and fast rule about this you have to take your cues from the painting if the painting has a lot of texture or impasto I may use very small sections to conform to that texture if the painting is split into multiple pieces I might want to use large sections to keep the strength of the washi paper so all of that residue on the painting that's all the adhesive that I'm now going to be removing with a solvent and once that's all removed the painting is back to the state it was when it came into the studio now one thing that's really cool is that the solvent that's gonna soften up the adhesive used to do the facing isn't going to affect the surface grime or the old varnish it's a totally different type of solvent and it has no effect on those other materials so I don't really have to worry about disturbing the surface grime or the old varnish so sometimes I can even use this facing material and this solvent on paintings where I don't want to remove the varnish for some reason so it's really interesting to have solvents that affect an adhesive but don't affect a varnish or affect of varnish but don't affect the adhesive having a lot of different arrows in your quiver is really a benefit to the modern conservator and so the next step that I'm gonna do is something called a vapor treatment and I'm gonna be again using the hot table to apply heat pressure to the painting but in this case I'm going to be softening the painting with distilled water because I want to make sure that the canvas is flat and I'm making a sandwich of absorbent cotton blotter paper on the bottom tame nylon release layer which is that turquoise blue sheet painting and then mylar which is going to seal off the painting in this little envelope I'm gonna turn the heat on I'm gonna extract the air I'm gonna apply pressure and I'm gonna heat the table up it's gonna make the canvas pliable and the pressure the downward pressure is going to make sure that the canvas is flat and so when it comes out of the hot table and out from underneath weights it is now a smooth and flat canvas it's important when doing this process to make sure that you have the right amount of pressure and heat so that you don't damage any of the paint layer if you use too much heat or too much pressure you can actually melt or crush the impasto and that's something that's done way too often so it's just a matter of being delicate so many of you were eagle-eyed in spotting that I was going to be using gelatin for this stage but you were wrong in assuming that it was bovine or cow gelatin this in fact is fish gelatin and the reason that I'm using fish gelatin as opposed to pork or cow gelatin is because it melts at a lower temperature and I don't want to burn myself or the painting so it's a little bit safer and ultimately I don't need the strength of cow or pork gelatin now what does gelatin it's it's made from the bones skins and connective tissue of the animal and so in this case it's all the bones skin and connective tissue of the fish it gets boiled down it gets purified and then it gets dried in sheets and it can be reconstituted in warm water now the reason that I'm using fish gelatin here as opposed to a modern modern synthetic adhesive is because when I do the lining process I am going to be using a modern synthetic concert patient adhesive and that adhesive is soluble in a petroleum solvent and I need to make sure that whatever adhesive I use with this washi kozo to help align the split pieces of the painting keep them keep the registration correct isn't going to be affected by the heat or the solvent in the lining adhesive because if it is this this washi kozo that's holding the pieces together might soften up and the pieces may move and be misaligned in the lining process and while you've heard me talk a lot about my distaste for using animal based products for a lot of reasons but primarily because they can get pretty disgusting they're vulnerable to mold pests and they smell really bad sometimes you have to use what works and in this case the fish gelatin is a really great adhesive and it's going to do exactly what I want if there was another adhesive that would do the same job but was an animal based I would probably turn to that but in this case the fish eliten is the best tool for this job so I have to my reservations aside and employ it because success is the name of the game that's what I'm shooting for so a lot of you asked why I was going to be using such a large scissors to cut out such a small piece of canvas as opposed to using an exacto blade or scalpel and actually believe it or not it's easier to use the scissors and move the scissors and the paper to cut out an odd little shape like this than it is to use a really sharp blade one there's just a much smaller chance that I cut myself and I really don't like cutting myself and - it's just a little bit more accurate so by using the combination of movement and both the piece on cutting and the tool that I'm cutting with I can actually get pretty accurate and of course this inlay is necessary because as you can see there's missing canvas and if I were to line the painting without this inlay I would have a pretty big divot that I would then have to fill in with a fill in medium and while that's certainly not the end of the world I have can that is a similar texture and it's going to build up that area so I don't have to use such so much filling and that reduces the chance that they fill in cracks or flakes off or other otherwise deforms now this piece of tape that I'm going to be using it's actually bookbinders tape it's an it's a tissue paper with an acid free archival adhesive on the back and I could have used the washi Koza with the fish gelatin but this is just very small piece and it doesn't need the same strength so I reverted to a little bit of a shortcut here I'm preparing the lining canvas and I just need a large piece of Belgian linen canvas that's going to provide the base for the lining and what I'm going to be doing here is an interleaved lining because this painting was split into four pieces and the original canvas cannot provide any support for itself whatsoever I'm adding a piece of det film which is a polyester film it's basically a heavy-duty heavyweight in mylar film in between the original canvas and the aligning canvas and what that's going to do is provide some rigidity and some immobilization of the original canvas so that as humidity changes and the canvas both the lining canvas and the original canvas expand and contract with those humidity changes we don't see a manifestation of those splits on the face of the painting if I didn't quit this interleaf in overtime we might see those cracks or tears come back and that would defeat the purpose of aligning so immobilize in the canvas and adding that extra layer of support is really beneficial so with the original canvas now coated in a conservation adhesive and attached to a thin flat spun nylon gossamer that's just going to allow for a little bit more adhesive to stay and a little bit of dimensional support while I handle the painting I can remove the excess and this is just something I want to do to keep the edges painting clean and since there's no reason to have all this excess material I'm going to remove it with a scalpel and the next step is to prepare the painting and all of the materials for the lining process so I'm going to take this original canvas I'm going to trim off the inlays that I did that are on the edges because I don't want those sticking out and I'm going to assemble the sandwich once I get the linen prepared and I'm gonna cut off this little piece of bulging linen because I don't want it to Telegraph from the back of the canvas to the front of the canvas now even though I have that rigid mylar PE T film this little bump could make a dent in that film and could project to the face of the canvas in which case we'd have a bump visible from the front so the PT film is going to go on the back of the painting and then that painting is going to go onto the new Belgian linen canvas and then all of that is going to get taken over to the hot table and it's going to be lined and that's the process whereby the application of heat will activate the adhesive and pressure will force all those materials to bond and you can see here that as I smooth it out you have a nice even surface a little difficult to see but those cracks the splits at this point I have to remove that washi photo that I put on earlier to stabilize the painting as I did the lining process and here you'll see the importance of using a different adhesive than what was used during the lining so simply by putting moistened sponges on the surface of that washi kozo that this gelatin becomes pliable and I can peel up that paper without worrying that I'm softening the adhesive that was used to line the painting and jeopardizing the quality of the lining now here we come to probably what everybody's favorite part of the video is the cleaning process it's certainly exciting for me to reveal what the painting looks like I may be the first person to see this painting in a hundred years underneath all of this grime and old varnish and so it's kind of cool that I think that maybe I'm getting the first look since the artist created it anyhow I'm removing the accumulated surface grime first because I want to make sure that whatever is on there isn't going to prevent the solvents from softening up that varnish layer if I don't do this step and remove the surface grime first the solvents won't be as effective and it might lead me to choosing a stronger version of the solvent or a stronger solvent in which case you can run risk of damage to the painting now without a doubt the number one question I received on this video pertains to this part of the cleaning process and what exactly I was removing from the painting now I'm removing a lot of discolored varnish and you can see just how dirty this painting is over time this varnish disc colors with exposure to ultraviolet light and oxygen and it needs to be removed in addition to removing a lot of discolored varnish there is a ton of over painting on this painting as you can imagine any painting that's this old has likely come under several attempted conservation in the past and while we use modern archival synthetic and reversible paints that wasn't always the case for years oil paint was the preferred medium for retouching sometimes it was tempera or watercolour and these materials are not part of the artists original vision and so we want to remove them if safely possible to reveal what the artist originally intended so you can see up there on the hand there's kind of that pinkish area well that was retouching and as you see in this area right where I'm cleaning by the crack or that that split there's a lot of over painting there too at some point somebody probably tried to touch it up and they used oil paint and so I'm going to be removing all of that you've often heard me talk about working in areas of similar colors or confined spaces and particularly with a painting of this age it's even more so important to really confine where you're working so that you don't run the risk of damaging the paint and so here I'm just working on those white or whitish areas generally the whites are a little bit more stable than some of the other other colors due to the presence of the lead or zinc that was in them a bunch of people asked about the health hazards of working with these solvents and removing the old varnish and will over paint yes there there are health hazards but you take precautions and as you can see I'm wearing gloves and I'm using a pretty mild solvent here so a respirator isn't necessary but I do have positive airflow in my studio so I'm not breathing it concentrated solvent there's air moving around so any evaporating solvents are highly dissipated now all those little black spots that you see that's not dirt or something on the face of the painting that's the actual canvas that's where the paint has been abraded so much so that the weave of the canvas and the under color the priming or the under under painting is coming through and I'll address that more when I talk about the retouching process now cleaning this part of the face it became evident that pretty much her entire nose was over painted in addition that entire eye was over painted it's difficult to see when the painting was really dirty because everything kind of looks mushy and muddy and brown but as we start cleaning it more and more we can start to see the difference and we can start to reveal the old over painting and of course none of that is original and we want to remove it because not only is it not the hand of the artist but in this case it's pretty lousy and it looks pretty bad so as I do more and more cleaning I'm going to try to use solvents as much as I can to soften and remove the old over painting provided that it's safe and none of the original paint is affected but at a certain point I'm going to have to switch from solvents and start to move to a mechanical process which you'll see coming up and again you can see some of the over paint because it's generally areas that are really flat and don't match the rest of the painting and the area of red was so thoroughly over painted that as it gets clean you can see just how much was done and how bad it was beforehand it was kind of a brown muddy ash red color and now we have some of the delicacy of the brushwork we can see the shadows and highlights in the fabric and we can see what the artist originally intended now this spot right here is where everybody seems to freak out and I can understand why because what you see right now is varnish being removed but as I clean it more and more a lot of green Bluegreen starts to come off and a lot of people thought that I was removing the original paint and damaging the painting but actually that's all over paint so at some point somebody another conservator or somebody who thought they could fix this painting or make it better just repainted all of that blue and they did it with bluish greenish and they did it without a lot of skill and with a lot of a lot of tact and with a lot of a lot of delicacy and so it's my job to remove all of this so all of that blue that you see coming off is over paint none of that is original paint and as I move down to the rest of the cloak we can start to see that it wasn't really a green cloak it's that beautiful ultramarine blue that we so often find in religious paintings now here's the part I was talking about about having to switch to a mechanical process so I'm using an incredibly sharp scalpel and I'm just trying to slice off and remove that old oil paint and you can see that's the oil paint coming off right there and what I'm revealing underneath it is fill-in material and that's probably a calcium carbonate or chalk material that was used to fill in where the original paint was lost so again I'm scraping off old oil paint and I'm using very light pressure I'm just letting the sharpness if the blade glide across and take up this layer of over paint and it's always my hope that what I find underneath is the original painting and that somebody was just sloppy or careless or a little trigger-happy or brush happy or lack of a better phrase and that I can use the original as much as possible to reconstruct what was there unfortunately in this case pretty much all of her nose is missing all of this area that I've just revealed is over paint and fill-in material and so none of that is original so as I'm working I realized that I'm gonna have to do a lot of retouching and a lot of filling now a lot of people asked about this fill-in process and why I was doing it and what I was using this is a commercial-grade filler that's made out of calcium carbonate limestone quartz pulverized and an emulsion to hold it all together its water reversible it's flexible and it can be removed in the future if ever needed and the reason that I'm putting this on is because there are gaps in the painting you can see right there there are a bunch of gaps along the tears and throughout the painting if I were to just retouch those gaps what we would see under a raking light would be divots and little dents where my paint may match what the surface wouldn't and so I need to make sure that that surface is brought even so this painting didn't have a lot of impasto which is the physical build up of paint created by the artist and that makes filling in these got these losses a little bit easier because I just need a relatively smooth surface if there was a lot of buildup I would have to sculpt all of this body to match because of course if you have a lot of texture and then you fill it in smooth even if your color matching is on point the texture is gonna look wrong so this one the painting was a little bit more cooperative and was nice because there was a lot of work and knowing that I wouldn't have to do all that sculpting and texture matching was kind of a relief and of course wherever I put the fill in medium on I had to take off the excess because as you can see as it is now it's just too much so I'll use a swab with denatured alcohol and water to soften and remove the excess filling material and I'm just working to get this level with the original paint so anywhere that I have built it up too much I'll remove it and use my fingers to feel also your fingers your fingerprints can kind of act as a little bit of a sandpaper so to speak and so you can rub the area and remove a very delicate amount of the fill and medium and so you can see here again I'm just trying to remove the excess and only have the areas where the missing paint is filled in and you can even see some of the areas where the old fill and medium remains particularly right here on the right side there's kind of a cream-colored section I could have dug that out but then I would just have to fill it back in and so at some point you have to make a decision about how much I'm doing and how much drama you want to expose the painting to and here I'm using a scalpel because it was in the high spot and I just wanted to make sure that I got it down so any number of tools can be used at this stage and if I were sculpting it I would use brushes dental tools fabric just about anything to get the texture right now for this piece because it came in without any structure or any support we had to decide on a new support to use and because the information that we had was that this piece was Italian I decided or suggested and the client agreed that we should use a reproduction period Italian support so this one looks a little different than these supports I normally use it's a lot more expensive and a lot harder to make it's not necessarily any better or worse than the other ones it's just different but because this is an Italian piece that we thought you know it would be nice to use a period Italian stretcher and a bunch of people asked me if I ever accidentally hit my fingers with the hammer or the tax and the answer is oh yes all the time pretty much non-stop I lack my finger with the hammer or I'll derive those tax right into myself a good thing is that they're sterilized so I'm not gonna get tetanus or anything like that the bad news is it'll be really sharp and it really really hurts so you know it's very fun and I try not to do it but unfortunately it happens another question people had is whether I work in silence all the time and the answer is no of course not I'm not a lunatic or a sociopath when I'm filming I work in silence because I'm sure you guys don't want to hear National Public Radio or podcasts or whatever music I'm listening to and because it makes it so that you guys can hear the sounds of what I'm doing a little bit better so generally I do this I listen today radio I listen to podcasts but then again sometimes I listen to nothing there are days when I just want the peace and quiet of working or times when I'm working on something that I'm going to be extremely focused on and any distraction is unnecessary in addition there are times when I'm working on things and I need to hear what's happening to the painting maybe I'm scraping or you're chipping or something like that and I hear sounds of my work so that I can gauge how it's going so here I'm just using a little bit of mineral spirits or loose mineral spirits to remove the excess and this is just all that excess filling material but you can start to get an idea of what this painting is going to look like and so this is another you know really exciting part for me this in the next step getting a look at the painting and it's kind of cleaned upstate and you can see just how much filling material I did remove compared to when I put it on the painting you remember that was kind of like a 1 inch wide band across all of those tears and now we have just the terror filled in so this is the isolation layer that's going down and this one if you notice it's a little bit thicker I mixed this synthetic resin to a more viscous state for two reasons one I wanted to make sure that it didn't penetrate into the canvas into the paint too much that it sat on the surface and also I wanted to utilize any self-leveling properties that a more viscous solution has and because this painting was in really really rough shape I wanted to try to even up the surface as much as possible and with the painting completely varnished with an isolation layer we can now start the retouching a lot of questions were asked about my old palette I still have it I still use it but for this video I wanted to show more clearly on a clean palette what I was doing and just how few colors I was using for the retouching and so you can see here I have what three four seven colors that I'm going to use for the majority of the retouching I'll add some later obviously to do the blues but it doesn't take a lot of colors to do retouching effectively and I just wanted to show that in addition I had a lot of questions related to how I determine what to reconstruct when there's such catastrophic losses and you know I've talked about this before but if possible I will reference other works by the artist if other works by the artists don't exist or I don't know who the artist is as in this case I will start to look at other examples of similar works so other portraits and depictions of mother Mary in this classical pose other pieces from what I think would be the time period that this painting was painted and I will start to develop a sense of what I think might have been there based on all of that information now of course this is my judgment and it's open to debate ultimately though this is as said before something that happens as part of the discussion with my client and generally my clients trust my judgement I've been doing this quite a while and while there's certainly always room for improvement I think that I do a pretty good job of hitting the mark and staying on track so that's how I decide what to recreate and ultimately we have to remember that all of the materials I'm using the isolation layer the varnishes the retouching paints these are all removable so if somebody decided that this painting had more value or more integrity without my retouching all of my work can be removed and well that might sound sad or maybe someday is make me a little frustrated you know that's part of the deal that you make when you're a conservator that nothing you do is permanent and so I have to execute my work faithfully and honestly but always knowing that at some point in the future it may be removed I had a lot of questions on how I can match colors so accurately and so quickly well I mean obviously this is sped up and it's not real time but you know practice I've been doing this a long time and I have a really good understanding of the palette that I'm working with and how I can achieve different colors with my paints and so kind of knowing my palette knowing how my paints react and just having a lot of practice lets me get to those colors pretty quickly and that's a lesson for artists that take is that you know if you keep your palette pretty limited and you're using colors that you are very familiar with you'll have more control over your palette if you keep adding colors and adding paints then it's like adding ingredients that you haven't used when cooking and they they major not successful we hope they will but they're also going to be challenges in working with those new materials so those new colors so try to keep a limited palette a controlled palette one that you're familiar with and you'll have better success you'll be able to achieve your end result faster and with more confidence than if you're using new materials or new colors all the time so if you remember I talked about all of these little black dots when I was doing the cleaning process and just as a refresher those black dots aren't dirt or grime that was left on the painting that's where the painting had been so thoroughly scrubbed and over cleaned or skinned that the high points of the canvas the texture of the canvas was revealed through the paint and you know I have to decide how many of those I'm going to be touch obviously I could start at the upper left corner and just were inch by inch and retouch every single one and that may be what some clients desire but generally when a painting has this much damage I try to tell the clients that I'm gonna take my cues from the painting and what I mean by that is that this is a relatively small painting maybe what two and a half feet or two feet by 18 inches 24 by 18 something like that so a viewer is gonna look at this painting from maybe two and a half feet away three feet away at maximum up to about a foot away and so when I stand at about three feet away from this painting if I see something that becomes a visually problematic distracting it takes away from the enjoyment of the image damage that pulls my eye away from the fordist and to the trees so to speak then I will consider it a candidate for retouching but you know if this painting were a much larger painting let's say it were five feet by ten feet then I would be viewing the painting from much further distance and I wouldn't be so concerned about all of those little issues so now I'm going to be applying the final varnish and this is just to protect the painting and to give it that final Sheen that I want I had a bunch of questions about how long this piece took and it's hard to say because I can't work on one piece start to finish I have to leave time for various procedures to dry or for the painting to settle but altogether I'd say that I worked on this painting over the course of about six or seven weeks on and off every day some things like the retouching I have to say back from every now and then so I don't lose my mind but I don't quit crazy because it takes a lot of intellectual and emotional investment so I may only be able to retouch for 20 minutes 30 minutes an hour at a time and so here we have the final result and I was really pleased with this and my client was really pleased to I know you guys are always asking for client reaction videos I'm always asking but a lot of my clients aren't really interested in being featured on a YouTube video that's gonna go out to a gajillion people eventually I'll find one and when I do I will interview them and put it up as part of a video but until that point I guess you guys are just gonna have to enjoy the process and me remembering on about the process anyhow this was a really exciting project for me I loved paintings like this that are really catastrophic ly damaged and require a lot of investment intellectually emotionally technically by me those are what makes a conservator really excited about their jobs so the more damaged the painting the more of a hot mess it is so to speak the more exciting it is for me so this was really one that I was really happy I had and I really enjoyed so thanks for watching as always I'm gonna be putting out some more videos shortly hopefully it won't be a month in between videos like this time but I appreciate you guys and I look forward to seeing you next time

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 1,105,978

Rating: 4.9615731 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, binaural, narrated

Id: Sy5fMPS_8hY

Length: 41min 26sec (2486 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Tank-Tanglefoot]

I’ve watched a couple other of this guys restoration videos , he’s incredibly talented . Some of the restorations take weeks or months to complete ,I can’t imagine the skill and patience it takes to do this work .

[u/YOUREABOT]

The Dealer watching him call them out for mishandling the painting: surprised pikachu face

[u/ColinStyles]

He's very defensive in this one, clearly the client was not pleased unfortunately. Though he took a lot of liberties compared to what he normally does, so it's entirely possible there is some reason for the displeasure.

Still a good watch!

[u/GDVisionz]

His YouTube is Baumgartner Restoration. He has videos that just show the restoration of the art or narrated versions explaining what he’s doing and why. 10/10 would recommend.

[u/ballerinafrog]

He is so defensive in this video! I wonder why?

[u/MrShineTheDiamond]

I love this guy! His videos are excellent!

[u/GoldenGonzo]

I wonder how long he's been doing this? I don't recall him mentioning in the video how long he's been doing this. I wish I knew how long he's been doing this.

[u/Moveover33]

i dont know why it is so satisfying to see that gook as it is removed by that knife blade.