Scraping, Scraping, Scraping Or A Slow Descent Into Madness. The Conservation of Mathias J. Alten

this video is brought to you by Nord VPN voted best VPN in 2019 and recommended by top technology experts [Music] so for this video we're gonna be following along the conservation of the painting that actually didn't look that bad when it came into the studio there were no holes or tears or other major structural damage the paint layer was stable there wasn't a lot of loss and by all accounts it was really just dirty it looked as if the old natural resin varnish had yellowed and browned over time now there was a lot of crackle or but that wasn't a great concern the painting had been mounted to a relatively low quality piece of quarter-inch plywood but as you've seen in videos past that's not that big of a deal we can take the painting off the plywood or the plywood off the painting now this artist matthias alton was a native of Grand Rapids Michigan and by virtue of proximity here in Chicago I've seen hundreds of his works and that familiarity led me to have some concerns about this piece because it didn't look like alt and left it like this that is somebody else had worked on this painting in the past and as I started to make some tests on that varnish layer I discovered that varnish it was not it was polyurethane and of all the things that I hate including staples polyurethane is right up there because it's not a reversible product now you can try to use chemicals to soften it or to remove it but they're incredibly aggressive and they can do damage to the painting and so after making several tests it became clear that there was only one way that I was going to be able to remove this polyurethane coating and that was going to be scraping now the saving grace is that whomever applied this polyurethane to the painting did it atop a dirty painting now that is there's some varnish residue or surface grime that was sitting atop this paint layer and that's really important because polyurethane forms a mechanical bond to whatever it touches as opposed to a chemical bond and so the surface of this painting with all of that impasto that is the texture of the brushwork all those little nooks and crannies provide a ton of surface area for this polyurethane to adhere to and the fact that this painting was coated with an old varnish or had some surface grime on it prevented this polyurethane from forming an extremely strong bond with the paint layer that is it bonded primarily to the old varnish and surface grime and that old varnish and surface grime acted as kind of a release agent and that release agent made it possible for me to use an incredibly sharp scalpel to slowly chip away at this polyurethane now as easy as it looks let me assure you it is not and was not and that was something that I had to raise with my client any time you have to remove polyurethane from a painting there runs a very high risk of damage to the painting now whether you're using chemical stripping agents or solvents or mechanical means like I'm doing here even if you're incredibly delicate and work very slowly there's still a chance that some damage occurs now this polyurethane has bonded to that old varnish but in some places it's bonded to the paint itself and as you can see even if I'm chipping up little little specks of it some of that polyurethane is going to pull up some of the original paint and there's just no way to avoid that I can use a sharp blade I can go very slow and if that polyurethane is grabbing on to that paint layer there is a chance that it's gonna pull it up no I talked to my client extensively about this and that's really important because this is the type of project where even if you have a good plan even if you have good practices and techniques and even if you've done it before there's just no predicting how it's going to turn out after all these are unique objects made by people and so there's always an X Factor when you work on a piece like this so I had a long discussion with my client about the realities of this piece that in best case scenario we would end up with a gorgeous painting underneath that had no damage but in worst case scenario the client had to understand that this painting could be damaged that even if I take all precautions there is a possibility that this conservation will not be successful and I needed my client to be very clear-eyed about that reality now luckily my client trusted me and said go ahead I want to see what you can do indemnified me from any losses and I started to work on this piece now had I any concern that the risk of failure was higher than the risk of success I wouldn't have taken on this project but I've worked on literally hundreds of Alton paintings and I know that they're incredibly well painted well-built and really robust plus I've done this before I've removed polyurethane by scraping many many times and all of those factors combined with my experience led me to believe that this would be a successful project even if it wasn't under percent perfect a hundred percent of the time so I started scraping and it looks pretty easy but rest assured it's incredibly difficult it's a delicate balance of force and resistance and making sure that you are moving fluidly but not too fast and kind of present in the moment this is definitely not one where I'm zoning out to podcasts or listening to music I was working in complete silence trying to focus on the work at hand as much as I could that said it's an incredibly long and tedious process that at times was unbelievably frustrating and had me banging my head against the wall [Music] a big part of conservationists protection and not only for the paintings I'm talking about for myself and so while this crazy mask protects me when I'm using hazardous materials Nord VPN protects me when I'm online so what is a VPN well you know in the movies when they're trying to trace someone's location and it keeps bouncing from country to country well it's kind of like that when you get online all your traffic passes through your ISP servers which means they can see and log everything you do online they may hand your browsing history over to advertisers government agencies or third parties Nord VPN redirects your traffic through a specially configured remote server this way Nord VPN hides your IP address and encrypts all the data you send to receive the encrypted data looks like gibberish to anyone who intercepts it with over 50 500 superfast servers around the world using double data encryption Nord VPN ensures that no matter where you are laptop desktop or mobile device or what you're doing you are protected so if you're tired of leaving yourself vulnerable online Nord VPN has you covered get 70% off Nord VPN only three dollars forty nine cents a month plus you get an additional two months free at Nord VPN comm slash Julian with coupon code artwork so back to the mind-numbing scraping and I'm only half joking when I say mind-numbing I would generally only work on this for about an hour at a time usually in the morning first thing when I got in phone off the hook no music playing no podcasts because I wanted to be fully aware and conscious of what I was doing was fully engaged in the scraping process but that takes a lot of energy and it's really stressful and that's why you can only work on it for so much time plus he start to go cross-eyed looking down and scraping for so long but I want to make sure that I was fully aware and present with this process I also mentioned that some parts were easier to remove than others the sky and the areas where the figures were were much easier to remove than the area of the brown and I suspect just because the polyurethane had a better purchase on the paint and as you can see here no matter how slowly I'm going matter how delicate I am some of that paint is being lifted off all those little brown spots in the yellow polyurethane that's original paint that's being lost and I'm not scraping the surface of the painting my blade isn't coming in contact the edge isn't I'm using my blade kind of as a wedge to get under the polyurethane and then chip it up but unfortunately that polyurethane is really strong and so it's taking some paint with it and this is really frustrating because as a conservator this is not what you want to have happen you don't want any of the original to be damaged and also this means that I now have a lot more retouching to do to address all of these areas of loss and so this project was really hard one to do because it was really really emotionally frustrating not just difficult with respect to the scraping but I can take umbrage in the fact that I don't feel like I'm responsible for the damage I feel like the damage is the responsibility of the party that applied this polyurethane to the painting that is when they applied that polyurethane they set into motion a series of events that now I'm just cleaning up that is they planted a landmine and I'm just not stepping into it so I'm going to do the best I can removing this polyurethane and then I'm going to do the best I can with retouching but this is a situation where you kind of have to sigh and say it is what it is now we also mention that some spots were more difficult to remove than others and in those areas I switched from scraping with a scalpel to using a different technique now for those areas I was using a hot air pencil and a hot air pencil is a tool that projects a superheated stream of air now this air can be heated up to anywhere from 120 degrees to about a thousand degrees no I'm definitely not using a thousand degrees here because I'd not only melt the painting but I would probably burn myself as well I'm using a relatively low heat and I'm doing so in hopes that it's going to soften up this polyurethane enough that I can peel it back and remove it with less losses than if it was cold and brittle because these are areas that I discovered had a really really strong bond and trying to chip them off when the polyurethane was cold and brittle just wasn't working the polyurethane was too well bonded to the paint and it was taking off too much paint which is why I switched to the hot air pencil now the hot air pencil is not a perfect tool as you can see some paint is still being lost and that just goes to show how strong this polyurethane is now if there were any other technique that would get this polyurethane off with no damage I would have switched to that in a heartbeat but I have a lot of experience removing polyurethane from paintings and there are really only two ways to do it chemically or mechanically and chemically usually doesn't work with paintings unlike on wood where you can coat the entire thing with an industrial grade stripper and let it sit overnight and come back with a scraper and just kind of scrape it all off if you did that with a painting you'd be left with bare canvas at the end of the day I can't sand it off with a random orbital sander like I could on a piece of wood because again I just have a raw piece of canvas so scraping and chipping the hot air pencil is the best that we have at this point now at some point in the future if a better technique or approach comes along I will be the first to jump on board because I have probably lost more years of my life and frustrations scraping polyurethane off of paintings than I care to admit but like I said it is what it is so with all of this polyurethane now finally removed we can start to get a glimpse of what the painting is supposed to look like we see that there's actually some color underneath there and that's really really rewarding because getting a first glimpse of the painting with how all of that brown on it makes me feel like all of this effort has been worth it but the work isn't over yet I still have to remove this painting from the pop of the plywood and so I'm going to face the painting and you've seen me do this many times before using a reversible adhesive and washi kozo and in a nutshell this is meant to not only protect the paint layer but also make sure that if any of it is detached from the canvas during the removal process it's not lost that is it's bonded to this piece of paper and so when I remove the paper I can save the piece of canvas a piece of paint that has detached now once this is dry I will start to remove the painting from the plywood and I've made some initial tests before I face the painting and this is not one of those cases where I'm going to break out the power tools or the router sled and remove the wood from the painting because I got lucky really really really really really lucky and so as difficult as removing that polyurethane from the face of the painting was removing the painting from the plywood was so much easier and if you can't tell I was very very happy because I was exhausted at working with this painting and the last thing I wanted was another really difficult process the adhesive that they used was a standard rabbit skin glue adhesive and they first bonded the original canvas to a very thin piece of what looks like cotton muslin or something and the adhesive that they used was very thin it wasn't a lot of it and over time it had become very brittle and degraded and so I could use a palette knife and scalpels and just very slowly work in there and detach the painting from that piece of fabric and like I said this was an incredible relief because if I had to scrape off layers of plywood from the back of this painting I might have thrown either myself or the painting out of the window I know I'm on the first floor so it doesn't have the same weight it did in my old studio where I was on the seventh floor but I think you get the gist sometimes there are projects that just don't play nice every step of the way is frustrating and the painting fights you and I thought that this was going to be that way when I started scraping and so to find that the adhesive that was used to glue the painting to the plywood was very cooperative was a blessing and a big sigh of relief now that said I still had to get the thing off and I had to go slowly because the last thing I wanted to do was put a hole in the canvas or tear it or put any undue stress on that paint layer but working slowly I was able to detach all of that adhesive from the canvas and that piece of fabric and successfully remove the original from this piece of plywood and that plywood went straight into the garbage there's nothing of value there there's no forensic analysis that would be redeeming it just gets thrown away now once the painting is fully removed from that plywood I now have to remove that adhesive from the canvas and just a minute ago when I was singing the praises of the rabbit skin glue adhesive being relatively thin and integrative and easy to remove well I may have spoken too soon because the only way for me to get this off of this canvas is again scraping now I could expose this rabbit skin glue to moisture I could use lappa night or felt pads or directly apply water to it to reactivate that adhesive and soften it up but I don't want to do that because if I reactivate that adhesive it will probably penetrate down into the canvas whereas right now it's just sitting on the surface and if it penetrates down into that canvas it's gonna make some of the next steps that I do more difficult if not impossible and so for this I'm just gonna have to scrape and this takes a lot less focus and attention than scraping off the face of the painting but it still does require me to be fully present now it may look like I'm being really aggressive but that blade is just gliding over the surface of the canvas and I just want that brittle glue to break up and detach now I've used wire brushes in the past I've used dental tools in the past but my favorite tool is just a very sharp scalpel and let it rake over that canvas break up that rabbit skin glue and leave a raw canvas remaining so clean off all that rabbit skin glue the obligatory dusting towards the camera lens that I know everybody loves and now I can take this painting over to my hot table and address the crackle or now using moisture heat and pressure or what I call a vapor treatment I am able to soften that canvas and relax those cracks and I'm keeping the facing on here because the amount of heat that I'm applying to this painting is really really low it's maybe a hundred degrees and that adhesive is activated at about a hundred and fifty degrees but I want to keep it there because it's going to provide extra support so I'll turn the pressure up and then I'll lower it and then I'll allow it to sit I'm using a piece of balsa wood just to make sure any of the extra air is extracted from that envelope and now with the vapor treatment complete the painting rested under weights for several days I can remove defacing now the facing is activated by heat or by solvent and so I could have heated the painting up and peeled it off but in this case I'm just using the solvent because I don't want to subject this painting to 150 degrees and then peel off that facing you can see there's a lot of adhesive still left on the surface which is a good thing it means that I had a really good bond with the paint layer but unfortunately all of that adhesive does need to come off and so once I get that facing completely removed I'll use some cotton balls and the appropriate solvent to slowly remove the excess adhesive and the solvent used to remove this adhesive is really mild and it won't run risk of damage to the painting so with the adhesive all removed I can now do an impregnation and I'm using again a heat-activated conservation adhesive and it's been thinned down to the appropriate consistency and now I'm just rolling it across the entire back of the painting and what I want is for the canvas to soak up all of this adhesive I want it to penetrate through all of the nooks and crannies and voids up into all of those cracks I'll let it dry and then I'll put it back on the hot table turn the heat up to 150 create the envelope extract the air and force all of that adhesive up into and around all the cracks once the painting reaches temperature I'll turn the hot table off and allow it to cool and then once it's cool all of the areas of paint that are potentially loose or unstable are permanently bonded back down to the canvas now I mentioned that this painting was slightly dirty and that that was a saving grace it was but now I have to get rid of all of that dirt it wasn't terribly dirty and probably a lot of the old varnish or surface grime was lifted off when the polyurethane came off but you can see that it's dirty enough that it makes a big difference now you can also see that there are still a lot of little pieces of poly urethanes on the surface of the painting and that was because I didn't see those or I wasn't able to get them off but now with the painting fully cleaned I can see all the little spots that I've missed so back to scraping sharp blade going slowly working one spot at a time I can scrape off chip off shave off the existing polyurethane and as I do this the painting starts to come together and that is all these little distractions slowly start to disappear and I start to get a better idea of the colors and the forms and just overall what the painting was supposed to look like before it was coated with polyurethane now this point in the process I am just about sick and tired of scraping and it takes a ton of discipline and focus to be present and make sure I don't do any damage but there's no way around it and this is one of those cases where the heat gun would definitely do more damage than I want because these pieces are so small and the heat that comes out of the hot air pencil is kind of indiscriminate it's somewhat targeted but still you can't really control a blast of hot air if it wasn't clear that I wasn't having much fun doing this I think I think this makes it clear there are a lot of people who said that they would be very excited to do this all day long but trust me after seven or eight or ten or fifteen hours of scraping you'd feel like I did so once all of that polyurethane is finally off I can start to think about putting the painting back together and where the air where there is raw canvas I have to apply a ground medium before I can apply the fill in medium because the fill-in won't stick very well to the raw canvas so here I'm just applying a little bit of ground and then the fill and medium will go on those areas if only I could work this fast so onto the fill-in medium and this medium is gonna go on and because of that ground it's gonna bond really well and putting a fill and medium is really important because if I don't this canvas is gonna look like the surface of Mars it's gonna be all pockmarked and it's just not gonna look good from a raking light and even though we view paintings head-on we still look at them from all angles and if from a raking light or as the viewer approaches the painting they see a textural anomaly that's gonna take away from their ability to appreciate the image so wherever there is overfill overfill must be removed and this is done with cotton swabs and again just very slowly and very delicately I want to make sure that I'm removing as much of this fill in medium as possible I just wanted in the areas where the paint's been lost and again thanks to the marvel of modern editing I can work very fast which wasn't the case in reality and I'll have to do this a couple of times because as you can see there's still a lot of white residue all over the painting so I'll do it once I'll let it dry I'll do it again I'll do it again I'll do it again and I'll burn through a bajillion cotton swabs now the next step in putting this painting back together is a strip lining and this is necessary because the original packing edges were lost I suspect that they were cut off when the painting was glued to that piece of plywood so I'm fraying the edges of belgin linen and I fray the edges because it gives me more surface area for the adhesive and B it softens the edge of that canvas so that it doesn't Telegraph through the original canvas to the face I'm using a heat activated adhesive film and I iron it onto the original canvas and then I'm going to apply the strip lining canvas and iron that on as well and once that adhesive cools that bond is incredibly strong but more importantly it's flexible and so being flexible means that as the canvas moves that adhesive will too so you're not going to get any areas where the adhesive constricts the canvas and distorts it now once the strip lining is all complete I can start the stretching of the painting now this painting did not have an original stretcher as we remember so I had to have a custom-built stretcher manufactured for this piece and this is a sugar pine stretcher which is a fast growing clear pine it's very lightweight it's very stable it's a really beautiful stretcher and the painting will get put on a stretcher I'll put a couple of tacks in the center of each length making sure that the middle of the painting is taut and then I'll slowly start to work my way out from the center towards the edges and this is a very old I guess ancient technique of stretching a canvas that ensures that there are no waves or ripples in the main body of the canvas that's not to say it is a perfect method there's a lot of debate about the best method of stretching a canvas but if you keep even tension you can get great results using this approach and you can see I'm not using the pulling pliers because I don't want to subject this painting to a ton of tension it's a small painting and I can get enough tension with my hands and later on when I key the painting out I can add more tension and I'm just tidying up the corners folding them in and under so that they look good obviously this is the type of painting that will get a frame so this type of attention to detail probably maybe isn't necessary it's always necessary for me but on more modern pieces that aren't going to have frames this kind of tight corner is a much bigger deal now it's of cutting all the excess canvas off or god forbid gluing it down to the stretcher I just fold it over and I use a slightly smaller tack and I just tack it down these tacks don't really provide much by way of structural support but it's easy to remove if ever need be and it looks pretty tidy again making sure things look tidy if you hadn't guessed is something that I'm very fond of and so cleaning up these corners or the strip lining canvas overlaps is something that I take great pride in I think it's a sign of high quality workmanship and attention to detail and now on the keying now because this is a traditional wooden keyable stretcher support those joints where the wood meets aren't glued or nailed they're free-floating and they have those little mortises and I can stick one of these wedges or keys into that mortise and I can tap it down and when I tap it down that key forces the expansion of that joint I can see it right there and that expansion of that joint adds tension to the paintings such that it's not slack now I'm binding those keys because I don't want them to ever get lost or fall out and potentially wedge themselves in between the stretcher and the canvas and create a bulge now I've applied an isolation layer to this painting but you didn't see it because I forgot to film it trust me it's there but in this case it's serving a different purpose the isolation layer that I was using is a heavy molecular weight resin and that is it's got a thicker consistency it's more like a corn syrup than it is like water and because of that it can fill in some of those little divots those little voids that I didn't fill in with the fill in medium and that's important because that it helps unify the surface that is it helps make the surface of the painting a little bit more level so that under a raking light you don't see some of those little divots or imperfections now the retouching process as you have seen is slow and it is a lot of trial and error and try mixing a color see if it works Yes No go back to the palette change it warmer cooler darker lighter more yellow more green or purple more blue so on and so forth until you get something that works and when you get something that works in this case I'm trying to use it as much as possible so when Alton painted this painting he mixed a lot of these colors on the canvas that is painted wet on wet so there's a lot of blending going on in this sky which means that it's not simply a matter of mixing one color and then just using it all throughout the sky just about every centimeter or so the color slightly changes maybe it goes a little bit more yellow maybe it goes a little bit more purple or the cerulean is more intense or maybe it's more black so anytime I get a color that works I want to search around the painting to see if there's another area that I can use that color before I change it and move on to another spot that is if I mix the right bluish white yellow color I'd like to use it up before I change it to a bluish white pink because if I have to mix that bluish white yellow again that's double the amount of work so I'm going through just adding dots of color and as you can see it's starting to unify that sky there's a lot of work left to be done but even just getting rid of some of those minor distractions allows you to start to see the clouds in the sky where before you were just seeing the damage and that's kind of the magic of retouching now all this is reversible as always so if somebody wants to come back and undo this they can I'm not sure why they would but who knows it's not mine to say I mentioned when I was scraping that I was frustrated because it was going to mean a lot of retouching and it was a lot of retouching just like this gray pain retouching takes so much focus and so much attention that it's something that you can't spend all day doing partially because you just go brain-dead looking at the same thing not really looking at the painting writ large you're just looking at these tiny little areas to retouch so it's not like staring at a gorgeous painting all day long it's just staring at all these little areas of damage all day long so I generally try to limit my sessions of retouching to about an hour to two hours at max now when you get a day when everything is going right and your color sense is just perfect and you feel like you can't lose you may want to push it a little longer and in those days maybe I'll do three hours or four hours of retouching but that's usually my limit partially because I just don't like sitting still for four hours I'm kind of a antsy person so I got to move around but also after about four hours you're really just emotionally intellectually done with retouching and particularly in a painting like this where it's just little dots if it was the recreation of a face or you know retouching a hand that had some big losses that could be really fun there's some excitement in that there's you know an engagement but these little dots I don't want to say that it's boring but it's just not all that stimulating and so it makes it a little bit more tedious so I just try to limit the amount of retouching I have in one day and work a little bit and then I'll switch to another project now you can see as I mix the colors my palette looks like a hot mess it looks like a garbage dump but because all of those paints can be reactivated with solvent all of those colors can be reused and so what looks like a garbage dump or a hot steamy mess is actually a real big asset because instead of having to mix every color over I can start with what's on my palette and adjust it or change it so I'm kind of cheating the process I'm already halfway there in addition these paints are expensive and I don't want to waste them if I don't have to and one thing about mixing color is that sometimes it's not as straightforward as it seems or would appear like some of these colors you think it's mostly blue there's a but a pink in there but I'm not really using any red I'm using brown and blue and a little bit of orange to make those pinks and so having a good sense of how colors are made that is understanding that color a is really made of color B D F Q and Z that makes a big difference because it allows you to kind of see the parts of the total and not just the total so you can kind of understand how to mix that color how to get where you want to be with less trial and error and trial and error is what takes up a lot of time and the name of the game is trying to be efficient because if I can make this retouching take one week as opposed to two well not only will I do a better job because I'm spending less time on it and getting less frustrated with it but it's better for me as a business person to be able to get this painting done in a week also my client wants the painting back and I want it sitting at my studio for weeks on end in any event you can see that just by retouching that area which was probably 30 minutes worth of retouching the sky really unified now here on this figure you can see all of those little dots are where the polyurethane pulled up the paint and I'm gonna try to retouch as many of those as I can to unify the figure without really over painting the figure so I'm gonna have to leave some of them because if I try to retouch every single dot I may as well start at the upper-left corner and just repaint the entire painting and that is totally not OK so I'm just going along to try to get rid of these areas that flatten this space and that's really one of the main reasons of retouching is that when you see damage it flattens the sense of depth in the sense of space that the artist has created because they become superficial marks you see them on the surface they flattened all of that depth that the artist is created so we want to get rid of those so that you can start to see the hole that is see the forests not just the trees so again just slowly working through and when I find a color that works I want to try to use it up on my brush in other areas that also can use it don't want to have to remix the same color too many times and just kind of using my best judgment about which one of these things to retouch this is a small painting you saw it was probably what eighteen by fourteen give or take and so it's probably viewed from about two feet away and at two feet away anything that I see that's particularly problematic or draws my attention away from the image would be a candidate for retouching now I'm not going to look at this painting six inches away because then I'll see every possible little thing and I'll start to over retouch but I'm also not gonna look at this painting from 20 feet away because at 20 feet away I'm not gonna see any of these little spots and I'm not gonna do any retouching so I generally let the painting dictate how much I retouch by its size or its subject matter and this was a lot of retouching and I was happy to be done and the next step the final step is the varnish and I'm always excited to put the varnish on but oh he's still a little bit anxious because this is where any color matching that wasn't great becomes really evident this varnish reveals all of those little mismatches so I'm excited to see it all come together but I'm also fingers crossed anxious that it does come back together now I applied this one by brush because it's a small painting and I knew would give good results and I was very very happy to see this painting complete so you can see what was a painting that was totally covered in a thick coating of polyurethane not only obfuscated to the real colors of the painting but all the delicate brushwork in the impasto that's all gone all of those cracks that were present probably the reason that it was glued to the plywood those are gone too painting is stable now none of that paints gonna flake off and yes there was a lot of retouching but I think that after all of that retouching the painting has come together and it's unified and now we can look at the image that the artist created as opposed to looking at it through that Brown film or looking at it behind all those cracks I mentioned several times in this video that this was a really difficult project and that it was really frustrating and it was for a lot of reasons I really wanted it to go easy it didn't I really wanted the painting to cooperate it kind of didn't I was frustrated to all the losses but it is what it is and ultimately when I look at where the painting started off and where it ended up I think it's a great transformation and I'm pretty sure my clients gonna love it anyhow thanks for watching and after that I think I deserve some ice cream

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 3,511,607

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, Alten, Baumgartner, Julian, paintings, cleaning, scraping, repair, old art, new again, restore, Mathias Joseph Alten

Id: YOOQl0hC18U

Length: 40min 59sec (2459 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/claireauriga]

Julian Baumgartner has a lot of painting restoration videos on YouTube. They're fascinating to watch, not least because it's incredibly satisfying watching the brown grime and old varnish come off to reveal a vibrant image underneath. But as I was watching this one, I noticed a few things that made me think of /r/MensLib:

• He talks a lot about how emotionally frustrating his job can be when he has to undo poor conservation work, and how he manages his work around that. It's a nice bit of explicit emotional competency that we don't often see from men in the media.

• It's a job that requires gentleness and patience.

• Although I wouldn't categorise this video as deliberately trying to portray a different type of masculinity, this articulate, skilled man doing sensitive work is an example of a talented man who isn't doing something stereotypically masculine.

This subreddit often sees people asking for examples of diverse men, so I thought I would share this one when I noticed it.

[u/toddschmod]

I really appreciate how he knew his limitations and had no shame in them. He didn't push himself further and harm his physical and emotional well being. If you have that kind of luxury, take it and make the most of it. Most people who work have someone dictating what gets done and the amount of time they have to do it. Which leaves people over worked and over whelmed and depressed.

[u/ScottyHowl]

I love watching his videos. They're fascinating and they put me right at ease.

[u/Vladmir_Puddin]

I really enjoyed this

[u/Moiken]

I love this guy, and here's another that does something sort of related in a similar fashion

[u/CanadianCurves]

There was recently some drama in the restoration community because of him. They don’t like his techniques. Also he’s a bit of a jerk. Really bummed me out when I was told since I enjoy his videos :(

[u/HumanistGeek]

That's pretty neat. I'm curious about a couple of things:

• Why didn't he use the hot air pencil more extensively?
• Did he consult images of the unrestored artwork during the repainting phase?

It seems there are lots of details that were lost. For instance, that clump of trees in the background lost some of its smaller vegetation and even a few trunks!

[u/battleborn5]

I love watching Julian’s videos. I was once showing my husband one of his videos and just sort of dozed off for a bit. It was the middle of the day but I felt so relaxed!

[u/failing2start]

This is so cool and I don’t know if I would have thought of it in this context had you not shared it that way. V. Cool, thanks!