Revisiting an Old Friend; The Second Conservation of Anne

this video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business [Music] meet and this isn't Anne's first time at Baumgartner restoration in fact five years ago I first met pan when she came into the studio looking a bit worse for wear she was discolored and dirty and needed a little bit of attention and when I sent her home she was looking right as rain now in preparation for an upcoming move and came off the wall and went on to the couch to relax a little bit her loving cats seeing this decided to join her and well got a little too close the cats ended up sitting on an and causing a bit of damage you can see the tears in the holes and the other canvas deformations as a result of these cats sitting on her so Anne's back for a little bit of touch-up and frankly I'm not all that disappointed because I really like Anne and I'm looking forward to spending a little time with her now if you were curious what Anne looked like the first time I had her well here you go she was really quite dirty lots of discolored varnish and a massive hole that was revealed as I took off the over paint right in her forehead but I sent her home looking better than she came in and I'm looking forward to doing it again now what's really exciting about this project is that it allows me to share with you something that I've talked a lot about in my videos and that's something you're probably already familiar with and that's archival materials minimally invasive techniques and fully reversible materials any modern conservation needs to use archival materials so that they don't change and deteriorate over the future minimally invasive techniques to preserve both the integrity of the artwork and the artist and fully reversible materials so that if ever the conservation needs to be undone it can be without running risk of damage to the original painting and even though this work isn't terribly old at five years it's going to allow me to show you exactly what that means and how the choices I've made and the materials I've selected play into that calculus and it all kind of begins with removing the painting from the stretcher and I use tacks because they're really easy to remove now if I had glued this canvas down with rabbit-skin glue or wax resin it'd be much harder to remove and it would make a bigger mess in addition I can salvage these tacks if I want and reuse them they're only five years old and there's no reason to throw them away they aren't damaged or rusted now one thing that you may notice is that my original label from five years ago is missing and that's because somebody removed it so I can include labels and reports with all of the materials and techniques I used but if somebody takes those off unfortunately all that information is lost now after I get this canvas off of the stretcher I'm gonna need to do kind of a pretreatment before I can tackle the tears and reversing all of my conservation work from the past and that's because when the cat sat on the canvas they broke through and created several distortions those are bumps and dents and other planer deviations that are problematic so what I'm gonna do is take some acid-free cotton badr paper and moisten it with distilled water and then place those pieces of blotter paper over the planer distortions in the canvas and press them with weights and I'll let that sit overnight I'll come back I'll change them out with dry blotter paper and I'll repeat until the canvas is flat and smooth and in a stable State so this is the point in the video where I take a break and I talk to you guys about Squarespace and about how amazing they are for artists and creative people because with a few clicks you can get a website up and running you can customize some gorgeous mobile-friendly templates you can even import your images from other platforms all over the web so you can get your content on your website and Squarespace even has a built in e-commerce solution in case you want to sell something through your website but I get it not everybody watching this video is an art store a creative person so how about this for a pitch Squarespace makes websites and websites exist on the Internet and the Internet is really only good for one thing and that's funny cat videos so maybe you want to build a website of your own funny cat videos I mean you don't want to get on the cat's bad side look what they did to this painting so head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace calm slash Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain okay the cats are happy you've built that funny website and now back to the painting I've let it rest for a couple days I've changed out those blotter papers and now the canvas is flat and smooth and that's really important because I want to make sure going forward we don't have any bumps that could get in the way now the next thing I'm going to do is remove the strip lining that I added and I use a heat and salt and activated film adhesive to bond this new Belgian linen canvas to the original canvas and with a tacking iron I can heat up that adhesive and it softens and I can simply peel back the strip lining canvas and you can see just how easy this is compared to something like rabbit skin glue or wax resin or PVA or contact cement or epoxy this is about as easy as reversing a strip lining can be and when I do it I'm just taking off the canvas I'm not damaging the original or pulling any of that apart and that's really really important and so as I'm removing this strip lining canvas you'll notice that the adhesive gets soft and it sticks to both the original canvas and the strip lining canvas and that's not really a problem because I can remove that again with heat or solvent now I'm not going to use heat to remove it because can create a little bit of a mess and it can burn if I apply the tacking iron directly to it so what I will do is once I have this drip lining fully removed I'll go back in with the appropriate solvent and I'll expose that adhesive to it allow it to swell and soften and then remove it with a cotton ball and the solvent that I'm using here to soften up this adhesive is one that doesn't pose risk to the painting and I know that not only from experience but because I tested it when I worked on this painting the first time I certainly wouldn't use an adhesive that required a solvent that would damage the painting but as you can see all of that adhesive comes off pretty easily and now the canvas is left as it was in the original state before I did the strip lining and just like with the adhesive I used on the strip lining I can expose the adhesive I used for the bridging to the appropriate solvent or solution and allow it to swell and soften and once it's soft I can use the scalpel to peel up those Belgian linen strands used in the bridging and remove them from the canvas and this is in contrast to let's say a canvas patch with rabbit skin glue or PVA or epoxy or some other adhesive this this comes off very easily I mean literally in a matter of seconds I've removed the repair and in a matter of more seconds I can remove the adhesive now the cotton ball does shed a little bit but I can rub all of that up and get rid of that residue and so this was extremely easy to remove and there's nothing left on the canvas which is the whole point of using reversible materials now one of the most exciting things I do as a conservator is removing old varnish from paintings and that natural resin varnish is usually very yellow or brown or cracked and brittle or even sometimes cloudy but in this case because I used a modern synthetic ultraviolet stable varnish with a plasticizer in it it's pretty much immune to all of those pitfalls it's not yellow it's not cracked or brittle and it's not cloudy and the best part is that it comes off of the painting using an extremely mild solvent one that won't damage the painting and again I know this because I tested the painting when I applied the varnish the first time and so unfortunately for you as the viewer this is really anticlimactic but as this solvent evaporates you can see the difference between the unvarnished area and the varnished area one thing you also notice is that I'm using large cotton balls as opposed to small swabs to remove this varnish and that's simply because a I know what type of varnish was used B I know that the solvent that I'm going to use to remove it won't harm the painting and there is no reason why I can't use a larger swab it's a little bit more efficient and it gets the varnish off just the same as if I was using a small one and now we've come to a part of the conservation of an that I'm not terribly excited about and that's the reversal and removal of the old retouching and I'm kind of bummed about this because to be frank this is some pretty darn good retouching kudos to the Past conservator and it's kind of disappointing to have to remove it just have to redo it it was a lot of work the first time and it's gonna be a lot of work this time but unfortunately the presence of these paints is going to interfere and complicate some of the procedures and materials that I'm going to be using to complete the conservation of an so this retouching has got to go now these paints and don't use oil as the binder like oil paint they use a resin and so when they dry they don't cross link and Harden and oxidize like oil paint does which means that in the future they can simply be removed by exposing their retouching to any number of solvents and the conservator can choose the solvent that's best for the painting and simply roll over the retouching and lift it right off and there's a big difference between reversibility and removability just about everything is removable I mean you can use really harsh chemicals to remove oil paint you can use invasive and aggressive mechanical means heck you could sandblast a painting and you could get the old retouching off you'd be left with a raw canvas but you would have removed the old retouching but reversibility means that they are designed to be removed and that in the process of removing no damage will occur to the original painting and so that's the real benefit of using paints that are designed for conservation they are reversible removable without the risk of damage to the painting and so in what two minutes or so you've seen me remove all of the retouching that I put on this painting that's pretty easy huh and if there was any doubt about the solvent I'm using and damage it may pose to the original paint I'm using a swab here saturated with solvent on the blue which is generally a pretty fugitive and delicate area and as you can see nothing is coming up nada zip zero zilch just as we like it now at this point with all of my old work removed I can turn my focus towards putting an back together and that all begins with an interleaved lining now an interleaf lining is a procedure whereby a new piece of canvas is adhered to the back of the original canvas with a rigid substrate in between and this is done to provide extra support to a painting that is otherwise damaged or fragile and the fact that these cats damaged this painting just by making contact with it tells me that this canvas really is brittle and will benefit from that interleafed lining and the first step is to apply an adhesive to the back of the canvas and this is a solvent heat activated adhesive that has been warmed up to facilitate flow and adhesion and I'm just getting good coverage to make sure that all of the canvas will bond to the substrate and to the lining canvas for this lining I'm gonna be using a piece of PE T film and I like this material because it's immune to the solvents that I use and it doesn't move with heat or humidity changes and it provides just enough rigidity to immobilize this canvas from any of those environmental changes that would cause micro movements and make those tears and holes more pronounced or even Telegraph to the front of the painting which is something of course that I don't want so I'll mark and trim the PT film and then I'll locate the inscription on the back of the original canvas and this is because I want to create a window so that we can see this inscription through the lining now I've seen other conservators in the past do tracings of inscriptions and take photographs of inscriptions when the painting has to be lined and that's totally okay and in fact that's absolutely necessary when there isn't an inter leaf or a rigid substrate but because I'm using that substrate I can create a window so the first thing I need to do is remove the excess adhesive from this window area and that's done with a solvent that just softens up this adhesive and you can see just how easily it is to remove and that's really one of the benefits of using modern conservation designed adhesives that we don't have to get really messy and we don't have to use really aggressive solvents so once I peel back this blue painters tape you'll be able to see the window that I've created and that's important that there's no adhesive there because the ese excess adhesive would gum up the works now I'm going to be covering that window I created with the piece of blue painters tape and that's necessary so that I can trim out the canvas in the next step now with the location of that window marked off with the blue painters tape I can start transferring it from the PT film to the Belgian linen line in canvas and this is where having that blue painters tape is really helpful it's much easier than trying to measure and transfer those measurements from the film to the canvas and then trying to ensure that I've got straight lines in the exact size here I can just trace around that tape and get the exact location and the size of that window that I had created so much easier work smarter not harder of course once I've got that location I will trim out that window with a really sharp blade because I want to make sure that I don't fray the canvas and get any fuzzies because this will be visible from the back so I can remove that window and I can trim off any extra strands and I can prepare to start assembling the painting for the lining process now this lining contains several different parts there's the original painting there's the inter leaf there's the lining canvas and then the adhesive that's used and at this point I just need to make sure that everything is where it should be that everything is aligned that the adhesive film that I'm ironing on is in the exact location that I want I'm gonna cut out the window from that film and then I can start to put the sandwich all together and there's nothing terribly complex about this but it's really really really important that everything is precisely lined up because you only get one shot at this now yes I can certainly reverse this if it doesn't line up but that would be a waste of material and time and there's absolutely no reason why I can't get it right on the first shot so with everything aligned and set where it should be I'm gonna attack the painting in place just on the corners and I will transfer it over to the hot table where I will begin the lining process with the painting on the hot table I can evacuate the air turn the temperature up and finish the process of lining this painting with an inter leaf with the lining complete I can now turn my attention to stretching the canvas onto the original wooden stretcher and here we can see the window that was cut out of the lining canvas and just how effective it was at revealing the inscription now before I'll do the stretching I'll take advantage of the painting being flat on the table to apply the fill-in medium where the paint was lost and this medium is necessary to fill in any voids and he chips any cracks otherwise there would be a gap when the retouching was completed I'll apply the fill and medium and overfill around the entire area try to remove as much as possible and then come back later and remove the rest and this fill-in medium is flexible and water-based so it shouldn't crack overtime and if it ever needs to be removed warm water or warm water with a little bit of solvent in it can easily take it up now once that fill-in material has dried I can begin the removal process now I can't use sandpaper or anything else terribly abrasive because it would damage the paint surface but I can use my finger prints because they're just rough enough that they can start to remove some of the high spots and when I'm done with that I can come back with a cotton swab dampened of course and just start to remove any of the overfill now it's really important that I get all of this overfill off because as it currently is it's covering up some of the original paint and I don't want that but I also want to make sure that it's level and smooth so that when I'm done doing the retouching it doesn't look like a big bump or a wrinkly surface now with all of the excess fill and material removed I can begin putting the canvas back on the stretcher these old wooden stretchers sometimes have a tendency to fall apart or go out of square as they're being handled so once I've squared them up I'll secure them in place with a couple of nails in the back and those will get removed later on once I have the painting oriented on the stretcher as I want I'll place a couple of tacks in the middle of each side and then work from the center out and this is an approach that helps eliminate any slack that may be caught in the canvas but because this canvas has been lined with an inter leaf I don't really have to worry about slack and in addition I don't even really have to worry about tension you'll notice I'm not using a pulling pliers and in fact I'm not really even pulling the canvas at all this canvas is fully immobilized with that interleaf and that means that as the humidity changes the painting isn't going to expand and contract and so I don't have to worry about adding tension and keying the painting out on this stretcher now in the beginning of the video I talked about how it was much easier to remove this canvas from the stretcher because all I used were tacks and I'm going to repeat that practice so that in the future the next conservator and my god I hope it's not me as much as I love this painting working on it twice is enough the next conservator will have just as easy of a time as I did when I removed my old work I tidy up my corners just because I think it looks nice and even though many of my clients never ever see this or even if they do don't even notice it that's a good thing the last thing I would want them to see is something that they took notice of because they didn't like it now I mentioned that this painting didn't need to be keyed out and it doesn't but I'm going to install the original keys back in because they're original and they also help keep that stretcher together and tight so that it doesn't move around or or get loose and of course I will always tie these keys in place so that they don't get lost and that's important because I don't want them to be lost forever and also I don't want them to fall in between painting in the stretcher and create a bulge these have an isolation layer before retouching can be used for a couple of reasons if the underlying painting is vulnerable to the solvents that would be used to remove the retouching then a layer of resin applied before the retouching can protect and isolate the original paint from that solvent but in this case and more often than not I'm not using an isolation layer to protect the painting I'm using it to simulate what the painting will look like after the final varnish has been applied so that I can do my retouching according to those colors because as you can see there's quite a difference between the dry painting and the areas of the painting where this resin has been applied and any painting where there's a lot of retouching or particularly difficult retouching applying this layer of resin gives me the best possible chance of executing that retouching as best as possible on the first shot and this resin is synthetic it's not going to yellow or get brittle over time and it's easily removable with a solvent that shouldn't and will not harm this painting and I've made tests to ensure that in addition this resin is different than the one that I will use for the final varnish so if the final varnish gets corrupted by anything it can be removed without damaging or altering this resin so I'll apply this to the entire painting and then go over the painting to make sure that there are no fuzzies or brush hairs and if there are I'll remove them because those can be problematic later on and it's always easier to address them now and now on to my favorite and least favorite part of conservation the retouching it's my favorite part because it's where I get to see the painting come together and get to see the damage disappear under my own hand and that's incredibly gratifying and rewarding it's my least favorite because it's really hard sometimes and it can be really frustrating if things aren't going your way now the type of retouching that I'm going to be doing here is commonly known as mimetic or integrated more full retouching and that's in contrast to an approach called Netaji au which is an italian word that means sketching or hash marks and that's an approach whereby instead of trying to retouch the damaged areas so that they completely disappear and that they blend into the surrounding paint and effectively unify the entire images one a series of little dots or hash marks or check marks are made so that from a distance the damage disappears but upon close inspection the damage can be seen pretty clearly and this was an approach that was developed in Italy in the late 30s and early 40s and at the time it was completely appropriate and made a lot of sense because reversible and archival paints hadn't yet come into widespread practice and so many conservators were still using oil paint to do retouching and the consequences of using oil paint are pretty high it's a permanent medium that will change over time and it's not really all that reversible yes we can get it off but removable isn't the same as reversible if you remember from the beginning of the video so the approach was designed so that the damage could be addressed in a way that would allow the viewer to see the painting as a whole from a distance but still acknowledge that the painting had been worked on by a conservator and that those areas of retouching were different than the original but now since we have modern archival and reversible paints there's not really much reason to continue that approach at least for private practice almost none of my clients that approach and even those museums and institutions that I do work with they don't want that approach I believe it's still commonly practiced in Italy and on some old masterpieces it's very much the norm but until my clients ask for it it's something that I generally don't recommend because they're usually not very satisfied with the results they want their paintings to look as if there's been no damage and like I said because these paints can be easily removed there's really no consequence if somebody decides that they don't like the retouching well you saw a swab with the solvent can wipe it right off and because these paints fluoresce under ultraviolet light we can always see the work that the conservator has added so it's not a matter of trying to hide the work or it being permanent all of those issues for which tratado was developed have largely been solved and at one thing you may notice is the brush that I'm using it looks old and kind of beat-up and the bristles are all twisted and bent out of shape and that's true it's an old beat-up brush and the bristles are bent out of shape and I'm using it specifically for that reason normally these brushes have a really fine tip and they're really precise and sometimes when I do retouching that's really really beneficial let's say I'm retouching a very very small pinprick damage or a little crack or something that needs a lot of precision that's what I want but in this case I have a lot of material to cover a lot of paint to apply and the surface of this painting isn't completely flat and smooth and that what I mean by that is if you look at the forehead of and you'll notice that it's not one color it's lots of little colors mixed in together and so by taking a brush that has bristles that are a little bit beat up and askew and not very precise as I laid down the colors they'll kind of diffuse a little bit throughout the area that I'm retouching and that gives me a better chance of matching or blending in to the surrounding areas so it's not only a matter of choosing the right color but it's also a matter of choosing how it gets applied to the surface that will help disguise all of this damage and there have been cases where I've used large brushes and and sort of stippled the retouching on the surface there have been times when I've used airbrush to apply it on a completely flat and matte surface and so in this case this is the best brush for the job now there's no trick to doing this it's a lot of trial and error and you can see that I'm makes them a color and then changing it and then going back over and then remix Inge and then changing and then going back over rinse repeat lather rinse repeat so on and so forth generally retouching skin tones and white whitish colors or lightish colors are much easier than retouching dark colors for some reason they just make more sense to me I'm sure other conservators other people have different feelings so I'm not terribly daunted by the fact that this is a large area of retouching right on the forehead now that being said it is a large area of retouching right on the forehead the only thing that I could think of that would be possibly worse is if one of her eyes was missing and I had to recreate an eyeball that wasn't there before because I'm sure there would be a lot of opinions about whether or not I hit that one on the mark anyhow I mean I work slowly go through this make sure that I get all of the colors right make sure that I get the texture right make sure that the volume of her forehead looks appropriate and I may come back to this in the following day and do a little bit more work give myself some space sometimes it's good to take a little distance between retouching when it's a large area like this you come back the next day and you realize that you need to add a little bit more white or yellow or maybe you just want to take it all off and start over again I won't do that here but I will take advantage of some time to get some distance and make sure that I like how this looks before I move on to the next steps you and just like with the forehead there are other areas of this painting that have damaged that need to be retouched now retouching on paintings like this is kind of fun even though I'd rather not have the painting damaged getting to work on really beautiful paintings that are well built and well created is nice it's a real pleasure and getting to work on paintings like this can also be really challenging because if you notice this skin tone has been kind of created and blended on the canvas and that is the artist painted this wall wet and blended in the kind of dark shadows into that green into that creamy color all on the canvas while it was wet and that's really hard to retouch because the paint's that I use dry really quickly and I can't really blend them on the canvas like the artist can so I have to constantly be changing the color of the retouching paint and applying it on top of itself and trying to blend it in a little bit but mostly using lots and lots of little colors I guess it's kind of like a low-res version of a gradient if you don't have a billion colors at your disposal if you only have a thousand you have to dither that and that's kind of what I'm doing here and this is really interesting because I have to recreate this lace work that was really beautifully painted but what's really fun about it is that once I recreate the lace I then have to add some dirt to it make it look like it's old because of course if I don't it's gonna look too bright to crisp to clean and your eyes gonna catch it so after I recreate the lace and and kind of get the base down I'll go back in with some paint color that looks a little dirty and I'll kind of add those touches to the paint so that it looks like my retouching paint which is flat has a texture and that some old dirt has gotten stuck along the edges or old varnish or something like that and so you can see just by adding a little bit of of quote-unquote dirt it makes a big difference in how your eye is going to read this area of new retouching and so that's one of the things that's really kind of fun adding cracks to my retouching or scratches or dirt it's just something that you don't think of right away when you're trying to make the damage disappear and now with all of the retouching complete I can varnish the painting and I'm using a synthetic resin varnish with an ultraviolet inhibitor in it and a plasticizer so that it's stable it's archival the same varnish I used in the beginning and I'm going to apply it via brush and you see me do this dozens of times already there's nothing terribly exciting about how this varnish gets applied it's very easy very workable and it's not terribly difficult I think one of the reasons a lot of artists don't varnish their paintings is that they're scared off by applying a varnish they don't know how they've never been taught and probably their first experiments were unsuccessful and so they never do it again but really it's pretty simple now once I've applied this furnish I'm going to allow it to start to dry and then once it's reached a level of tackiness that I'm happy with I'm gonna take a badger hair brush and I'm gonna start brushing out the varnish now I applied a pretty glossy layer of varnish to this painting surface but I want to knock it down just a little bit and so as the varnish gets really tacky I can drag the badger hair brush across the painting in multiple ways on the x-axis on the y-axis and diagonally and what its gonna do is put little micro abrasions into that surface of the resin as it dries and that's going to give it a real shimmery effect I'm not really sure how I can explain it just with words but it takes a very flat and smooth glossy appearance and makes it have a slight texture now you're not gonna see these lines but what you are gonna see is a really beautiful velvety glossy surface so instead of being matte or flat or stick lookin it's gonna have this crystal equality which i think is gorgeous and right when I thought that I was complete I noticed something that I had missed earlier on and retouching so I'll take the painting back to the easel and I'll mix up a little bit of paint and apply it just where I saw this spot that I had missed even on your best days you may miss something and the ability to go back in and rework it is really a benefit so just getting rid of that little dot makes a big difference and now the work is all complete and I can wrap up this painting I'll put the backing board back on I'll recycle it because there's no reason not to and once it's installed I will mark on my label what type of isolation layer I used what type of retouching medium and what type of final varnish so that the next conservator hopefully not me will be able to identify those materials and know what solvents and approaches to use so that there's no guesswork for them and here's where I'll show you the before and after how Ann came into the studio for the second time thanks to her cats and how I'll send her home but I was really happy that I could showcase with you the difference between working with modern archival synthetic and fully reversible materials and approaches compared to some of the old antiquated materials that I often come across and how that allows the conservation to be better for the painting for the artist and for the conservator and hopefully you'll understand why I choose some of the approaches and techniques a little bit better in the context of reversibility and how the next conservators job will be a little bit easier anyhow thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it subscribe watch some more you know the drill amigo No

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 1,854,847

Rating: 4.9595962 out of 5

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

Id: yZk4a4Xx9FE

Length: 37min 2sec (2222 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AyekerambA]

Would it be unethical to hide another copy of the label with info on the inside of the white restoration board thingy?

[u/mariatwiggs]

These are some of my favorite bedtime videos

[u/BroadStreet_Bully5]

Has he ever talked about how much these conservations cost? That must be a shit ton of tedious work.

[u/MadamKillay]

YES I FREAKING LOVE THESE VIDEOS!!

[u/sometimes_snarky]

Love These videos!

[u/jeanlucleotard]

This is terrific! Thank you. Panting restorations are some of my favorites on this sub.

[u/ophello]

Good shit. I subscribe to his channel. Goldmine of material for this sub.

[u/0xD153A53]

These restoration videos are strangely relaxing to me.

I wonder how much this guy makes...Talk about a skilled trade, with expertise that doesn't come cheaply...