Fine Art Conservation Live; The Cleaning Process Part 1

well good morning everybody or good evening I guess it depends on where you are thanks for joining me I'm gonna take a couple of minutes just to get everything set up so that I can manage this a little bit better than last time but I just want to say thanks for tuning in I really appreciate it I hope you all can hear me well I hope that you can see everything well this is kind of new for me and just trying to get all the tech stuff set up but alright so this is going to be a live stream of the cleaning of this painting and just want to give you guys a kind of setup of how I think this is gonna go I'm gonna pretend like I haven't already tested this piece and kind of start fresh and give you guys kind of the rundown of how I would approach this painting do some tests and then I'm going to start in with the cleaning process writ large and then at that point once I've gotten into the cleaning process and I'm well underway I'll start trying to answer some questions I tried to set up slow chat but you know I don't know it seems to be going by pretty fast as is I don't know why there's no HD there should be I'm using an HD camera um I mean we're just gonna have to we're just gonna have to see how this goes let me do some quick tech stuff just to see if I can sort that out bear with me [Music] [Music] let's see I guess I need my own tech production team huh sorry for the delay I'm just trying to get everything squared away but once I get the squared away we'll start in earnest all right I think YouTube is just reducing the quality because of the volume of streaming that's what I've been reading anyhow maybe it's just my internet connection who knows my son is here and he's using the computer so that may be it anyhow welcome let's start over good morning good evening thank you guys for joining me today we are going to be doing the live stream of the cleaning of an oil painting this is a 22 inch by 30 inch oil painting on canvas by artist II our sirs Minh si RZ ma n at least that's what I can make out from his signature I don't know a ton about this painting it came in from a client who is watching hello by the way and I learned that this painting belonged to the clients great uncle where it hung over a fireplace for many years before it was passed down to the clients parents wear it again hung over a fireplace for many years those pieces of information can be really helpful because it allows me to have a little bit better understanding of the life of the painting and where it has been what it may have been subject to and in this case over a painting it's probably been subject to a bit of heat exposure quite a bit of soot and other carbon particulate from the fireplace my guess given that it's been in the family for quite some time is that there may have been some smokers and in the living room there may have been some smoking so those things leading me to believe that there is an accumulated surface grime on the surface of the painting as well as an old varnish and so both of those things need to be removed before we can see what the artist really wanted us to see so the first thing that I would do is obviously gather as much information about the painting and the artists as possible if there was information about the artist online or in books in reference libraries I would research those here there really isn't that much information and that's not out of the ordinary there are plenty of artists who don't have big bodies of work or who don't don't land with a big big splash and we have a big mark on the art world that's not a condemnation of their artwork or anything like that so the first thing that I would do when I get to the painting is I want to take a look at the surface and this painting structurally this painting is in really good condition and doesn't have any holes or tears or flaking or anything like that that's one of the reasons I chose it is it's gonna be a straightforward cleaning but if those were issues I would address them before the cleaning I'm gonna be taking this natural rubber sponge which is just a natural rubber sponge on and it's really tacky and it's used to remove soot and particulate paper conservators use these a lot people who go into homes after fires use these a lot and they're really great to just kind of check to see what surface grime is on the surface that can be removed without any solutions or or solvents so if you can look this is just that the sponge it's nothing fancy and what I'll do is I'll just find a little spot and I will just check to see if anything comes off with this sponge and again I'm just trying to see what what's on this painting trying to learn as much about it before I start cleaning it as I can because the more information that I have the better off I am so you can see that nothing really came off which isn't good or bad it just is what it is so the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm take a little cotton swab these are paper rolled cotton swabs just in case anybody asks these are not plastic these are not what they're paper biodegradable and I will start off with a little bit of distilled water and just again on the edges and this is where the painting is usually covered by the frame this is where the rabbit the little lip that covers the frame covers the painting and it's a good place to test because it's generally not an area that's seen all that often now it also complicates it because it's covered by the frame it usually isn't as dirty as the main field of the painting somewhere in here but this is a good safe place to test and oftentimes I'll test multiple areas or different colors just to get a better idea of how each area is gonna respond so just a quick little testing you might be where we might be able to see there's gonna be a work in progress where then try to figure this out so you can see there's just a little bit of surface grime that comes up with distilled water so obviously not a lot and the painting is not terribly clean because of this little test so I'm going to move on to another solution that I use and one thing that I want to mention about um about all the solutions and the materials they use I am deliberately not providing specifics in terms of materials ratios solvents all that kind of stuff and there's a couple reasons for that and in the first and foremost is that I'm not trying to do a DIY video and telling you guys how to do this that's not my intention and I do not want anybody to run out to the store to purchase these materials and then try to do it on their own and then run into problems and a ruin their paintings or get themselves into trouble and then point to me and say well baumgartner told me what to do and finally the insurance policy that I carry does not allow me to provide instruction so it may be kind of a punt but um I'd like to stay in the good graces of my insurance carrier and so I am following their rules and not providing specific instruction and this is all been cleared with them so if you're disappointed I'm sorry but that's just how it is anyhow another solution that is slightly different than distilled water and I'm gonna go in a new spot and I'm gonna see what this does and the whole point of doing this a is to learn what's on the surface and how best to remove it because ultimately my goal is to get down to the varnish layer but I have to remove the surface crime before I get to the varnish layer because otherwise the solvents don't really penetrate this accumulated surface grime very well they can and if you really abrade the canvas and really scrub it then certainly they can but that's really not a good practice so it's the cleaning is kind of a two or three stage process first remove the surface grime then remove the varnish and then sometimes have to go back in and remove surface grime that's under the varnish so you can see here there we go again not terribly effective that's another mild solution so I'm gonna go to something a little bit different and see if that has any effect and again these tests are done partially on a part of the painting that's been covered so a lot of the particulate the soot and the grime probably hasn't accumulated in this area so it's it may not be completely indicative of the real accumulation of dirt and grime let's see but you know this is this is what we're gonna do I see a lot of you guys are complaining about the the resolution I am using an HD feed I am I will just don't deck it I'm on Wi-Fi but that shouldn't you know what I mean Wi-Fi so here you can see a lot more surface crime has come off and that is probably the solution that I'm going to use to clean the painting give me one second I'll check my speed just to make sure and it hasn't defaulted down to something less it may be a little shaky sorry I'll try not to give you guys all wonky no I'm at I'm gonna Full HD yeah I don't know what's what's going on so maybe it's YouTube I'm lying YouTube how about that um okay so now that I have a better understanding of the surface grime I can take some of these areas where I've made tests and I can start to look at the varnish layer and again I'm going to start off with a very very mild solvent solution and I'm gonna just see what I can remove and I'm not going to be surprised if this mild solvent doesn't remove a lot of varnish because it's mild and that's by design I don't want to start off with something that's very concentrated or very powerful because it's always better to take a cautious approach and work up to those stronger solvents if need be so not much now my varnish coming off but we'll go to something a little bit stronger and see how that works and this I've all done I've done all of this before I don't know if you can see it right up there there's a little test and over here there's a little test so I've already done this when I first received the painting and before I drafted the proposal so this is just kind of to give you guys an idea of how I would go about it when I do it and obviously this is a little bit abbreviated and I'm not taking notes because well I already know the answers so a little bit stronger of a solvent and that is a little bit more effective in taking off some of the surface sorry some of the varnish but not enough and not as much as I'm hoping so I will move to another solvent and see what that does now I have a good idea of what kind of varnish was used on this painting given the age of the painting and given that it's an American painting and it is most likely a damar varnish DeMarre is a natural resin varnish that comes from a tree it's tree sap and [Music] that's probably the most common varnish used in historical paintings it's actually probably still the most common we used varnish and it's a fine varnish the only problem is that it yellows and it deteriorates over time so knowing that given the time period I have a pretty good idea that that's tomorrow and I call so and I can smell the damar when it starts to come off with the solvent yeah so another solvent and there we go you know that one's a little bit more effective so that may be this solution that I'm gonna be using so before I can take the solvent and kind of start cleaning the painting I'm going to be whoops sorry let me turn that off I will probably get many phone calls during this feed because of course on the business and I'm still working I'll ignore them all if you're calling me and watching this I'm sorry I'm ignoring you all right so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that that cleaning solution that was effective in getting the surface grime off and I'm gonna start working on part of the painting and I'll start up in this corner just because I'm a righty and starting at the left hand corner is really effective so this is a brush and it's got the the paste on it I make this paste and it's a combination of materials that my father and I perfected over many years based on research and literature from other conservators and so this I'm gonna put this on the surface and and what this is gonna do is just kind of break up the surface grime this will not affect the varnish no matter how much you put on no matter how long it sits this paste will not remove the varnish layer and that's important because I'm not trying to remove the varnish layer at this point I'm just trying to remove surface primer so that I can access the varnish layer and you notice that I'm working in a section here I'm not gonna kind of slather the entire painting over with it because I want to make sure that I can keep control and I'll use the bristle brush just to agitate the surface a little bit to break up whatever is on the surface and in this case it is most likely soot I can smell it there's a lot of nicotine or tobacco tar or whatever's in cigarettes that's one of the funny things is sometimes if I'm doing cleanings of a lot of paintings they're very smoke damaged by the time I come home I smell like an ashtray because the all that stuff that's on the painting becomes somewhat airborne or loose and of course it gets all over me so it's kind of gross I generally wear PPE I mean obviously I'm wearing gloves I wear masks and respirators when I do this but I can't talk through a respirator right now and I've given a list of my respirators away so at this point I will be fine you guys don't have to worry but it is best practice to protect yourself and I generally do that but for this demonstration in this example I'm not it's for your benefit so you can see you see how dirty the tip of that brushes yeah that's surface crime that is what's coming off of the painting so now I can take the cotton ball or - these are just non sterile cotton balls and I can start to lift up some of that surface grime and if there was any doubt about just how much surface brown was on this painting look at that and this you can tell a lot about a surface grime from its color this surface grime is predominantly gray which would lead me to believe that that's soot from the fireplace but it also has a little bit of brownish in it and that would be from the smoking this isn't like a hard and fast rule but you know over time you kind of learn to identify by sight by smell by sound even and I know it sounds terrible but by tastes and not like that I'm taking spoonfuls of this stuff but you can identify materials or solvents by all of your senses and that's something that you just kind of learn over time you pick up all these abilities to operate within your field that I don't think anybody in any school is going to tell you that you can hear the sound of a varnish starting to become tacky or you can taste the difference between this solvent and that solvent so this is what is on the painting OOP there you go it's disgusting it smells bad and it is obfuscating the true colors so I'm going to now work in another section and again you know just trying to keep this controlled now again because this isn't this stuff this solution sorry this is cleaner this paste isn't ever contacting the the paint layer it's not as high-stakes or risky so to speak as the varnish remover where you're using solvents and contacting the actual paint layer but it's still good practice to work in controlled sections because you know you never know what's gonna happen and you also never know if you're gonna need to take a bathroom break or if a client is going to call or or what and so you want to work in an area that's small enough that you can quickly clean it up so that you don't have to leave anything sitting on the painting that you don't want sitting on the painting you know it's kind of like like anything we're going to controlled amount and you have a better chance of success and so I'm not using a lot of pressure to to work on this painting just a little bit and I'm just using a bristle brush because bristles are pretty stiff and they give me enough agitation without really abrading the surface of the painting if I were to use something like a nylon brush or a brass wire brush then I would run the risk of damaging or scratching the surface of the painting but using the bristle brush its soft enough that it's it's not going to pose any harm and it it does a good job of agitating the surface crimes so that I can lift it off with the cotton balls surface crime is officially canceled today yeah surface crime is officially canceled surface crime gets canceled hardcore yeah in my studio would that this solution could go over the entire world that would be an amazing thing right now I know we're all dealing with a lot on our plates and I'm gonna try not to talk about all of that because I don't think that's why you guys are here in fact I think well maybe that's is why you guys are here you guys and gals uh if everybody's dealing with a lot I am all the people I know are IMing incredibly lucky and incredibly fortunate that I'm still able to work that my clients are still bringing me work that I work by myself so I'm safe that I can bring my my kids to my work if in case they need to be II taught I'm incredibly fortunate that my wife is still working that all of our friends and our family are healthy and safe I understand that that is not the case for everybody and though it it probably doesn't mean much I think that everybody who is directly affected by our current situation needs to know that those of us who aren't directly affected or who are less affected are really thinking and keeping all of all of you guys in our thoughts our prayers and trying to do as much as we can to support everybody who's having a harder time so I don't know why I got on that rant and that tangent um but you know we're all in this together anyhow back to thinking so right now at this point it stinks like an ashtray and this is one of those days where I'm definitely gonna have to take a shower before work and after work because it's gonna stink I'm not gonna talk about my wife and my kids because because let's see okay so I'm gonna try to start talking answering some questions they're coming in so fast I do have slow chat and top chat turned on but this you guys are just like you guys are pretty nutty yeah the painting is already starting to to look better it's you can see that just removing that layer of surface grime does a big deal and yes I will sometimes have to go over the same area twice with this with this cleaning solution if the surface grime is really thick I mean I've had paintings that I've had to go over three four five times with this because there's just so much stuff early on when I started working with my father he got a commission from the Playboy Foundation or the Playboy Enterprises which had a mansion in Lake Geneva out here in the Midwest and they had a whole bunch of Leroy Nieman paintings it's really big paintings of athletes and sports stars and they had been hanging in the Playboy Mansion for years and has been subject to all sorts of into curricular activities that one may assume happens at the Playboy Mansion during a party and when he got them they were so covered with soot cigarette smoke hamburger meat that he had to mean he joked about it laying them the floor and taking a mop but to some degree it was almost true that he had to I mean before he can even get to a point where he could start thinking about really doing the detailed work of cleaning the paintings I mean he was scooping hamburger meat and he there was I think I have somewhere a photograph of a cigarette that had been put out on the painting and that was embedded in the acrylic paint so this yeah sometimes you do have to go over painting multiple times to get the surface grime off and then there are cases where the painting has been varnished over a surface crime by somebody who just didn't clean it and I think I've talked about that on some of my videos and that's a really problematic thing um in those cases you get the first layer of surface grime off and then you you get the varnish off and then you have to go back to get the surface grime off again and then sometimes you may even find another layer of varnish it's like it's like one of those parfaits where you have multiple layers of deliciousness except in this case it's disgusting this so yeah my father passed away in 2011 unexpectedly not not really something I'm gonna go into a lot about here but suffice it to say it was a shock and a surprise and it was a pretty intense experience and and you know you go from one day to the next being an employee to running and owning a business you learn very very quickly again so for you guys who are just just joining in that is surface grime that is on the painting and that's a combination of soot and then tobacco smoke and dust and dirt and all that other kind of lovely stuff so you know this is and I'm gonna take the bait here I guess I'm bathing myself a lot of people talk about the patina on a painting and that it gives the painting a beautiful jinsei quoi I don't know a beautiful atmosphere you know kind of smoky dark brooding mysterious something like that and you know patina is one of those things that's kind of misunderstood I think furniture has patina homes have patina but artwork doesn't really have patina it's it's just dirty and and the reason that we can make that understanding is that the artist if the artist wanted this painting to be a dark nighttime scene the artist would have painted a dark nighttime see if the artist wanted a layer of brown or gray atop it the artist would put that there now at the time when this painting was was painted I don't know but I'm gonna guess probably 1830s or something like that maybe maybe 1850s he didn't have synthetic archival ultraviolet stable varnishes they had damar and they had mastic and they had cocoa and they had shellac and all of those natural resins they darkened with exposure to UV light the Sun light ambient UV and so it they didn't know that maybe they did know but they didn't have any other options so they didn't have any choice but to use the best materials they had even though they were fallible and the artist also certainly didn't expect or I don't know maybe they did who knows what artists think and expect that this painting would sit over a fireplace and be subject to all that accumulation and all of that smoke you know cigarette or pipe or cigar smoke so the idea that there is a patina on varnish sorry on a painting it's it's one that I just don't believe is true case in point when the conservators in Italy started to do the once-in-a-lifetime conservation of the Sistine Chapel they did it open and they direct a scaffold and they wanted the the pocketless to see it they wanted everyone to see what was happening and so the conservators were visible the Sistine Chapel was visible and as they started to clean the painting people started to throw things at the conservative shoes garbage and they started to yell at the Conservatives and it's because they said you're destroying the Sistine Chapel look it's got this beautiful moody quality to it and you're taking it off how dare you ruin the patina you you heretics and so what they did was they they covered the scaffolding with a reproduction and the Sistine Chapel so all those sad saps who travelled all the way to Italy to see it could at least see something and then they worked kind of privately until they unveiled it and when they unveiled it I mean to say it was a night and day difference just kind it doesn't even begin to address it the Sistine Chapel now after conservation is one of the most glorious pieces of artwork ever seen and of course the conservators knew was gonna look like that and it was because you know for five hundred years give or take the Sistine Chapel the ceiling was accumulating candle soot and bird poop and all sorts of other stuff that had been you know floating up to the ceiling during church services and from tourists and all that kind of stuff and so removing it revealed just how glorious and how amazing of a painting it was so you know it's it's always a delicate balance because we grow accustomed to the way that things are and things change so slowly that those changes are almost imperceptible it's like watching your hair go gray you kind of don't realize that it's going gray until maybe somebody one day says who Wow you know a lot of gray hair we're getting wrinkles in your face you know they happen so slowly that we don't necessarily see it until somebody points it out anyhow let's see any questions that a periodic care of artwork um I generally tell my clients the best thing to do is is nothing you can dust it but you know you really want to leave the cleaning to the professionals because you just don't want to get into a situation where something goes wrong and I'm not trying to say that you can't do things on your own but it's not a matter of getting the materials or the techniques it it's a the question is not if but when something is gonna go sideways and if you are not prepared for that you can get yourself into real trouble that's why any in surgery obviously surgeons need to learn but you know new surgeons who haven't conducted a procedure are always paired up with expert surgeons who have done it many times before so that if something goes wrong with the new surgeon the expert can step in and correct it and well that's part of the learning process so don't tinker with your paintings yourself or even do a conservator talk to your conservator and and figure out what the best thing to do is I'm just trying to look about some of these questions they come so ask air purification yeah I mean I do have a HEPA HVAC system that that cycles and circulates my air I used to have a couple of fume arms that could be moved at the old studio I haven't gotten those installed at the new studio yet because I'm debating if I want to get a portable systems or fixed systems but that's a whole nother thing I don't do paperwork conservation I don't do textile conservation I don't really do objects conservation and metal conservation I focus mostly on paintings and when I do run into a situation of paper or another material I will refer those people to other conservators I'm not trying to do everything I'm not trying to take everybody's lunch and trying to do one thing do it well and then keep other conservators alive and in business and you know I have a broad network of people all over the country who I refer so yeah cotton ball unrolled little wooden stick and this is the magic of how I roll my own swathe that's it nothing special there we go let's see and that is the swab there is a swab I'm gonna be using nothing nothing crazy I have a brother he is not involved in conservation he's an educator he helps me sometimes when I need help because he's my brother and for the record yes I do pay him I just joke about not paying him in the videos because it's funny and anybody who has a sibling can attest to that largest the most expensive work largest work I've worked on maybe a 35 by 15 foot painting that I had to stretch and do some conservation on most expensive worked on a 14 or 15 million dollar Roy Lichtenstein painting but you know that the value of the painting has kind of no interest to me I have no interest in the value of the painting and who the artist is and the value and how important it is really kind of falls away after your first dozen or so conservation at least it should because if you're still nervous or wowed about that kind of stuff on it's going to affect how you approach your work so anyway I've gotten swab I've applied some solvent to it and I'm gonna start up here in this corner and I'm just gently rolling and lifting the varnish off of the painting I'm not using pressure at all I'm just gently letting the solvent and the swab do their thing and this is one of those things I talk about a lot about working in a controlled area and because now I'm making contact with the original paint layer this is the high stakes part unlike retouching which can be removed or structural work which can be you know removed and redone you cannot put back paint that you have accidentally removed and so this is why the cleaning process is generally the last thing that conservators learn or should learn i apprentice with my father for make five years six five or six years before he let me clean a painting and then it wasn't a client's painting it was a painting that he had purchased at a flea market you know I got a five dollar painting which I some early destroyed but I'll tell you all about that in another video and leave something I got to keep some content for later so I am working just in this area with a blue in the sky because I want to get an idea of how this paint color responds to the solid and it's it's stable it sound it's it's responding how I hoped but this paint color the blue up here may respond differently than this red so I just don't want to start going crazy like that because I don't know if I need to have a stronger solvent or a more mild solvent on this area in this area so varnish old dirty discolored natural resin varnish that is what the artist click on the painting 100 years ago and never thought would turn this color so that's what we want to get rid of so that we can see what the artist wanted us to see which is his beautiful beautiful palette there is a sky let's see so I work on lots of um pieces at a time I mean anywhere from 10 to 20 pieces at any given moment and that's just because I run a private studio and I have all sorts of clients I have private collectors dealers auction houses galleries and I have to manage timelines expectations delivery dates all that kind of stuff um and also it if I worked on one painting at a time I'd go out of business number one and I'd go insane having a variety of work allows me to keep fresh and to stay engaged and interested in the work that I'm doing any repetitive tasks I've done too long the mastery disappears and the mundane 'ti takes over and what I mean by that is there's a certain point at which becoming a master or the zen of the the task that you're repeating starts to fail and it starts to become monotonous and you start to develop bad habits and bad form it's kind of like if you are if you play golf or if you play basketball or you shoot pool or anything where there's technique that you need to practice there is a benefit to doing a thousand putts or you know a thousand free-throws but at some point you've got to mix it up so that eight your muscle memory evolves the beats that you don't start developing sloppy habits that will then translate into your the form you're trying to create and be corrupting and so you know I try not to clean paintings all day or retouch all day because frankly by the end of the day if I've been retouching for eight hours I know that the quality of retouching that I'm doing at the end of the day is just not as good as the quality of retouching that I did in the beginning of the day when I was fresh and so I try to break it up you know we touch for an hour or two and then go do something else that is of a different technique and requires a different part of my brain and my body so that I can be interested and engaged so more varnish coming off um do I keep notebooks yeah I keep I keep a little notebook on I keep database on things um you know my father had notebooks that I have and those are really helpful because over time you know you come across the same paintings or the same artist sorry not same paintings you may come across the same artist several times and having an acute understanding of their works how they responded to different techniques materials etc can be really helpful because it allows you to kind of jump right in and and and not have to kind of reinvent the wheel also you know there are some galleries that I have long relationships with and I've been working on bodies of work for them for 20 years and I keep notes on the varnishes that I've used so that if I want to recreate one of those varnishes I have the exact ratio because sometimes you know they'll they'll tell me all that batch of paintings you did this past week the varnish was perfect oh my god whatever you know do that again and so in five years I can come back to it and say oh it was this that and the other thing they really liked it so I'm gonna recreate that varnish on another one of the artists paintings so keeping notes is really helpful for everything I mean if you're a baker and you keep notes you will probably not make the same mistakes twice you'll you'll learn from the work that you've done and you'll become better faster smarter [Music] do I get back issues from hunching over all day no I'm not I'm not really hunched over I keep good as good posture as I can and I I'm you know I'm on my feet all day and I'm pre active so I don't know talk to me in 30 years when I'm a hunchback and I guess I'll have to keep my words do I get hand cramps um not from this definitely from scraping my hand gets tired and fatigued which is another reason why you know I switch what I'm doing you know in some of the videos where I've had to scrape a lot that is done over the course of weeks because otherwise physically and mentally I would just I'd be done I have a dog you guys have seen her in um in one of my videos she's a Wire Fox Terrier and she used to come to work with me every once in a while to keep me company but she stopped because every time she comes here she eats something that she's not supposed to she eats a cotton ball or a piece of wood or I don't know a dust bunny or something because she's a dog and she's stupid um and then she gets sick and it's I'm a disaster so she doesn't come to work with me anymore also she's not a good employee and she's not a great shop dog why am I not making ASMR anymore um you know it's not a matter of you not wanting to it's partially a matter of the amount of time and labor it takes to coordinate shooting it just takes so much more planning and producing to to have a controlled environment where I can do the ass and our stuff you know I have to have my HVAC system off my hot tables off there's a train that runs outside that I have to account for in traffic and all that kind of stuff because I know that ASMR crowd he doesn't like it when sirens burst into some really soothing soothing sounds so you know if I can I will but there's you know it's it's just so much work and I do all of it myself I don't have a production team or a camera crew so it you know it's always a delicate balance competing with with actually work do I paint for myself not at the moment um I just have too much going on in my life I keep a sketchbook and at some point when I have some time I will take up painting again but not right now what's the oldest painting I've cleaned um data or data I don't know the oldest painting I've cleaned I just had a piece here from 1480 it was on my Instagram feed you guys can go check that out that that may be one of the oldest that was the oldest verified date I've worked on pieces that may be older but you know it's always it's always hard to tell the age of a piece and of course the owner or the client always always asserts that the piece is much much older much much more important or much much more valuable than maybe it really is and I don't care it doesn't matter to me but you know the client will say oh it's definitely from 1480 1454 cherdon oh it 1420 if it was 1410 this is from the 1300s so you know they always take it with a grain of salt my last name my father was Swiss and baumgartner is the keeper of the trees so I guess at some point in my family's history we had orchards or I don't know something like that trace the family back I think to about 1200 give or take but we stopped the records got a little bit hard to access at that point and so we we just said 1200 is fine we don't need to don't need to know anymore but who knows who knows I've never done a 23andme because I'm not interested in giving them my my DNA and my data also I'm not you know I have we have pretty good family records and so I'm happy and content with that when did I start thinking about the YouTube channel um okay well I'll take that one um so I think it was in 2016 like many people I had an Instagram and it was mostly full of pictures of food and my dogs and only four people followed it you know like everybody else's Instagram and I has I had a procedure at the hospital and I was bored and I was sitting in my recovery room and I thought you know maybe I'll put some of my my conservation photos up see if anybody likes those and I put them up and and people didn't like him I mean they they were interested so I created an account and started posting to Instagram and it was mostly I would have you know I worked by myself at that point um you can kind of kinda it can kind of be isolated to work by yourself and it was nice to connect to other people and also to connect other conservators who were online around the world and you know I also felt like well you know my friends ask me a lot what is it do you do what and I said just go to my Instagram so anyways I did the Instagram thing for a while and then or Thanksgiving one year it kind of went viral and kind of went crazy and I thought well you know this is kind of fun this this maybe a thing and it had just so happened that a couple a year or two earlier I had a wonderful william merritt chase portrait of a girl in the studio and it's up on my youtube it's probably the oldest video and i had hired a videographer to come and make a little eight-minute video of it I told her I wanted a three-minute video because eight minutes was too long and she tried her best and can only comment cut it down to eight minutes and I thought I was a failure so I pushed put it up and it you know just like everything on YouTube it languished in obscurity for a long time until I don't know somebody on reddit links to it something like that I don't know and again it just went berserk viral and and then it was kind of like gee this there's something to this let's try another one and it also to be frank it it was a way that I could stay engaged in some of the work that I'm doing that is otherwise not necessarily all that interesting sometimes conservation is boring but you know having having videos to film in production a post-production to do and editing and all that kind of stuff that is actually kind of um is kind of fun and it it keeps me engaged in projects and keeps me looking for new things that I want to share so that's how it started and then as you can imagine it just kind of took on a life of its own and now you know now I'm on YouTube doing a live stream that's something that I thought nobody would ever want to see funniest experience I've had oh let me think about that one do I work over holidays no I don't work on the weekends either geez are you guys counting how many times I say um is that what's going to happen here definitely don't make a drinking game out of it because and I'm gonna make it very far do I collect art not really um see there you go I have artwork that I have collected from friends when I was in school art school a couple of pieces that I've bought small pieces nothing extravagant or outlandish I'm not a big art collector I think perhaps one of the reasons is because I live with art on such a daily basis I get such a fill it's kind of like living inside of the museum that it's it's hard for me to imagine having to live with any one piece for the rest of my life that said if anybody wants to steal lady Agnew of lady lock nah I can't remember what the title is the the John Singer Sargent painting that's in the Museum of Art in Glasgow you you could you can send it to me that is the painting that I would covet more than any other in the world there's just something about that painting that's gives me chills seriously are you guys counting how many times I say um have I ever identified a forgery yes identifying forgeries and I think I talked a little bit about this in the last video it's a tricky thing most clients are completely unaware that their painting is a forgery and have no ulterior motives or nefarious motives

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 516,257

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Id: GXHEstR4jlk

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020