How Oil Paintings Are Professionally Restored | Refurbished

[Music] my name is sarah drew and i work at center art studio in new york city i'm restoring a portrait of edmund holland that was painted in 1895. this painting is an oil on canvas and it is in a painted and gilt wood frame both the painting and the frame are extremely dirty the painting has a very yellow varnish on its surface and the frame has many cracks and chips and loose areas that we will fix so the first thing is to unbox it when it arrives and to do an initial assessment take note of any condition issues and then you start the deconstruction process we're going to work on the painting and the frame separately the painting is held into the frame with nails so i used pliers to bend the nails out and it's pretty easy there were only a few of them i'm going to work on restoring the painting my colleague karen is going to work on restoring the frame so we bring the frame into our wood room so karen can get started working on that i begin by taking the painting off the stretcher so in order to do this i remove the tacks along the sides of the stretcher that are holding the canvas tightly onto the stretcher i use pliers to hold these tacks out and that loosens the painting and allows it to be a free piece of canvas again when the painting comes off the stretcher it's not uncommon for a painting to not lie flat because it's been held bent for you know decades so i cut a piece of silicone release paper and use a small tacking iron to iron down the edges of the canvas so it lays flat i do an initial vacuum to remove all the bulky loose obvious dust that is accumulated on the back of the canvas in the front of the canvas after i vacuum i use a vulcanized rubber sponge to remove more surface dust and dirt that is a little bit more ingrained into the surface of the canvas this is a specially made sponge that is very porous and pulls dirt off of surfaces that might be slightly bored ingrained into the surfaces we use light pressure with the sponge and we tend to go in straight lines as opposed to circular or scrubbing patterns we do a surfactant cleaning to remove grease and grime and oily substances off the surface of the painting at this point i'm still not doing anything to affect the varnish or the underlying paint or anything like that we use cotton swabs dipped in a solution of the surfactant soap and water typically wet the swab and then wipe the swab in typically circular motions over small areas of the canvas at a time and this is a very controlled way to remove the sticky grimy substances that accumulate on a painting surface over time the soap solution also removed over paint from a previous restorer there are a number of tears in the canvas that have been repaired by somebody else and they were not repaired very well so i removed all that off underneath the previous store i'd put a layer of paper on the surface of the painting which is an odd thing to do so i used a scalpel to scrape that off but between the heat gun and the scalpel we can scrape off the paper and we will repair these areas by patching them on the back and using a putty to fill in just the crack and make sure that we are not covering over any of the original paint once i've done my surfactant cleaning i am ready to assess the painting with a black light and do some solvent tests to see what will cut through the varnish and get down to the original paint layer i use an ultraviolet blacklight to assess the surface and this light allows me to see things that are going on under the surface of the varnish that might not be apparent to a naked eye i assemble various solvents that i believe will be contenders for cleaning and i do very small chest cleanings in discrete areas on the canvas to test and work out a plan for cleaning the entire surface of the canvas and i check my work with a black light to make sure that what i'm doing is working if i shine the black light over my test cleaning i want to see that that test cleaning window is reflecting back purple that means that i've cut through that varnish i've gotten down to the original paint and i'm it informs me and makes me feel comfortable moving forward to work in larger areas but similar to the surfactant cleaning i use large cotton swabs to work my way over the entire surface of the painting and it's very satisfying to see all the old yellow varnish come off i saved the face for last in this instance mostly because it's the most dramatic part of the pleading process and so it's good motivation to keep going and we want to get to the face so that's the most fun part to clean it also became apparent once i removed all the varnish that this painting which had been treated by this other restorer had been cleaned previously however it was cleaned a little too aggressively so there were areas where the original paint had become thin so now i'm realizing that i have a lot of maybe a lot more retouching in my future than i maybe anticipated once the painting is clean we remove the old patches and the old strip lining canvas that's on the back of the painting lancing who is the owner of the studio is doing this part lansing is taking off the old patches and the old strips to do this he uses a hot air gun to heat up the patches and this loosens up the old adhesive and allows lancing to take a battle tool to lift off the patch and we're left with the original canvas we will strip line the edges of the canvas this is so we will be able to restretch the painting tightly onto the stretcher we cut strips of linen and adhere conservator's adhesive to the strips and this is heat activated so we use an iron to attach these strips to the back of the original canvas we also will do the same technique for the patches that on the back and these patches will repair the rips that are in the canvas's surface we glue down the frayed edges of the strip lining so they also lay flat against the original canvas lancing will re-stretch the painting onto its original stretcher he marks the middle of all four sides of the painting and all four sides of the stretcher and then he lays the loose canvas onto the stretcher aligns the marks and then begins the stretching process he will use a tacking hammer and the original tacks that i removed earlier that we saved to reattach the canvas to the stretcher now my colleague tyler will be applying a layer of isolation varnish to the painting surface to protect all the original paint and create a barrier between the original paint and the paint and materials that i'm going to apply we're using a reversible non-yellowing conservatives varnish that's easily removable we brush it onto the painting surface all over and allow it to dry at this point we put the keys in the back of the stretcher and tap the keys to make the surface of the painting completely taut on the stretcher once the canvas is caught we use a water-based putty to fill the cracks in the canvas surface and fill in any areas along the edges or wherever it might need to have a surface evened out i select the colors that i expect i will need for retouching we're using gamblin conservation paints these are paints that are specifically designed for conservation work and they're soluble in solvent that are different than solvents that will affect the oil paint so again it's always very easy to remove for whatever reason i mix the colors to try to match the original color as best as possible i'll put paint on the surface if it looks correct i'll continue if i need to alter it i will one of the issues with this painting was that it has been previously over cleaned by another restorer to fix all this i will remove the previous restorers paint and in paint in just those areas of loss where the it's thin with our own conservation paint stippling very carefully in very very very small areas to make the painting look complete again i'm very careful to only put this conservation paint in the areas of floss i never want to cover up any original paint or do anything to obstruct the original materials that the artists put there i've in paint the entirety of the canvas and we do a final coat of varnish again this final coat it's the moment of truth it brings out all the work and once the final layer of varnish is on and it dries the painting restoration is complete so now there's the whole frame restoration karen does an all over vacuuming and then a sponge treatment of the frame surface to remove any loose dust now we clean the frame we use the same surfactant soap that we use on the painting surface two of the four mitered corners on the frame have very large gaps so we first will use a epoxy putty to fill these areas and then come in and fill over that with a water-based putty we fill the large ones it's always a judgment call but we leave the smaller ones to retain an element of age the ornament detail on two corners of the frame are missing we need to make a mold of the ornament that does exist then we use a plaster to actually cast a replacement karen glues them down onto the frame does a little bit more shaping and then we're ready to retouch the frame once we have the frame retouched we apply shellac to protect our work and make sure it's all sealed now the painting and the frame restorations are complete we put the painting into the frame and we hang the painting up on the wall and admire our work [Music] you

Channel: Art Insider

Views: 1,720,367

Keywords: INSIDER, refurbished, art conservator, art, paint, painting, portrait, clean, cleaning

Id: nLPFDOK7tJI

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020