Smoke and Mirrors

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 you know one of the greatest tools or tricks an artist has is to create an object that elicits within us some sort of emotional response another trick is that of illusion convincing our eyes and brains that a two-dimensional object is full of volume and life or death in the case of this beautiful little trump loy from the french meaning to deceive or trick the eye a trompe lloyd depends upon the viewer suspending disbelief and allowing themselves to believe that what they're seeing is real to fall for the artist's illusion but old varnish accumulated surface grime cracks in the wood panel itself and an old patch those are the seams and they become the focus of attention not the image and if the artist's work is good and the conservator can eliminate these seams well then the viewer can really fall for the magic and not notice the smoke and mirrors [Music] and when those scenes start showing well the illusion breaks down and that's true not only for an artist creating a trump loy but for a special effects producer on hollywood movie or even you when you're creating your website you see if it's not slick and smooth and doesn't look great well nobody's going to focus on the content they're just going to see the scenes and just like all the damage on this painting interferes with our ability to see the artist's magic the same goes for your website if the code is clunky and it doesn't work on mobile devices or the design is awkward and just not all that slick or the gallery that you're using to showcase your work just doesn't work well nobody's gonna see what you're trying to share they're just gonna see the problems the seams and the whole point of the website is to get your work your passion your art out to the world but with squarespace you don't have to worry about any of that their templates are beautiful and professionally designed to work everywhere their code is flawless and operates perfectly all of their plugins work without having to do anything but click they've taken all of the hassle out of building a website and have allowed you to focus on the magic so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com baumgartner to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain now before i can even think about the front of the painting in the image i have to address all of the structural problems and in this case the painting was glued down to an early form of plywood and that needs to be removed so i'm going to start by facing the painting using a conservation adhesive and of course washi cozo and this is going to protect the painting from scratches from handling and because this wood panel is split it's going to hold it together while i remove this backing had this not been executed well the video would be half over now i would be focusing on cleaning and retouching but because all of this old work was executed i have to first undo it and that unfortunately is one of the main themes of conservation undoing old bad work or work that has just expired so i've decided to put two layers of washi cozo on this painting just to make sure that the paint layer is very well protected because this paper while strong is very thin and while i'm removing that backing and handling the painting i don't want anything to happen to the front now this adhesive that i'm using is heat activated and once it dries it will hold this paper on very well it's flexible so in the instance that this board moves it's not going to crack or flake off or anything like that and it's designed for conservation so i can remove it with heat or a solvent so this is really the first step in so many projects because it is a critical one in making sure that the piece is safe and protected now once that facing has been allowed to drive for a day i can head over to one of my tables and begin the process of removing that backing board i'm gonna place this down on a sled that i have made i'm gonna secure it with some steel z-clips and screws and this is just to make sure that the panel doesn't move around and then i'm going to set up my router with a clearing bit before i do anything i'm going to put on a mask some eye protection and hearing protection because this is loud and messy and dusty going to lower this large bit down and then once i've gotten the height established i will start in the middle of the painting because it is bowed or convex and i will remove about a sixteenth of an inch at a time starting at the high point is really critical because it establishes how much i need to remove if i started at the edge and just worked across the painting well eventually i would start taking off some of the original panel and well you cannot undo that kind of work now i mentioned that this was some sort of early plywood and it kind of is it's strips of redwood with plaster in between them and cardboard on either side and it makes a ton of dust and the plaster and the cardboard destroy the bit so even though it's going to wreak havoc on my tools it's a necessary evil to use this procedure it's much faster than doing it by hand now once that plywood has been reduced to dust much of which is now on me i can take the painting out of the router's sled and i can think about removing the residue what i couldn't remove with the router with the majority of the material removed i'm now ready to start dealing with the excess that was just too close to the original panel for me to use the router i'll transfer over to my workbench put some bench dogs in the top and grab a hand plane and i'm going to start removing the high points where the z-clips were i wasn't able to route those areas out so using the plane clears off that wood pretty easily and then once those are cleared i can start removing the excess wood from the back of this painting i'm going to just focus on the wood because the paper and the plaster really wreak havoc on the iron in my hand plane and having just sharpened it i don't want to dull it too much and have to resharpen it midway through the process a sharp iron makes quick work of this wood it's really thin and then once i've gotten down to the board that is the cardboard i can start thinking about how i'd like to remove that again another manual approach there is i suppose some synergy when thinking about how an artist creates a painting they have multiple brushes palette knives different techniques for applying the paint and how a conservator undoes work here i've used a router sled i've used a hand plane and now i'm using a scalpel to remove the remnants of this board now i'm shaving down this cardboard till it's almost transparent and trying to get it as thin as possible luckily the individual who glued this panel to this board did a royally lousy job so there are large areas where there is simply no glue contact between the wood and the cardboard which makes for easy removal sometimes bad work is actually to the conservator's benefit peeling all of this up is nothing terribly difficult but having the right approach and the right tools makes the magic happen and once i've gotten almost all of the board off and gotten it really really thin well it's time for another tool in this case i'm using lapinite that magic gelled water that is going to allow this rabbit skin glue to swell up and me to remove the remaining board and the adhesive from the original wood panel and because rabbit skin glue is hygroscopic meaning that it absorbs moisture when exposed to that gel it will swell and soften up and then it can be simply scraped off the back of the board i'm using a dull scalpel here not a sharp one because i don't want to catch or damage the board and if i was scraping off a table top to refinish a piece of furniture i might use a scraper or sander but here because this is a piece of artwork i have to be a little bit more delicate and careful so the dull scalpel does just fine it's really amazing to see how well this glue comes off once swollen the wood gives up the bond and the glue just comes right off with almost no effort so that's great what we have is a beautiful piece of wood remaining i was once asked if facing a painting is absolutely necessary or if it is performative for these videos if it is just smoke and mirrors as it were but in this case it was absolutely necessary i used a power tool on the back of this painting then i used a hand plane and then i scraped it with a scalpel let's just imagine for an instant that i didn't face this painting even though i tried my best not to slide the painting around or to rough it up it did move and without this facing the front of the painting would have become scratched and gouged and well damaged and that's something that i just cannot have happen when i'm working on a painting so the facing was absolutely critical and even though some of it remains it comes off relatively easy another indication that it was really well bonded to this painting and doing its intended job now i mentioned that this adhesive was both heat and solvent activated well it can also be removed with heat and solvent and here painting on the solvent and allowing the adhesive to swell allows me to go over it with a cotton ball and simply remove the adhesive much like removing the rabbit skin glue except in this case it was designed to be there and with the adhesive removed i'm ready to start cleaning this painting and quite fittingly with the title of this video being smoke and mirrors i have to remove a lot of smoke from this painting cigarette smoke that is a nice thick coating of all of those lovely disgusting things that are in cigarette smoke for some reason paintings just love to accumulate cigarette smoke and you can see after the paste has been applied and the cigarette smoke has been removed we're starting to get a much brighter painting now this step is also critical because underneath this smoke and grime is a layer of discolored varnish but getting access to that varnish depends on removing this top layer of grime for the solvents that i use to remove the varnish don't cut through that grime very well and so it would lead me to using an ever increasingly strong solvent to try to cut through that grime and ultimately that solvent if it's strong enough could damage the underlying paint now once all of that cigarette smoke and grime is removed i can switch to a relatively mild solvent one that is safe for the painting and start removing that discolored varnish and discolored it was we can see that these feathers are actually white not yellow and all of that discoloration the varnish the surface grime well that flattens the painting it removes the depth and takes away the artist's magic in addition to removing the grime and the old varnish i have to remove a lot of overpaint that was added during the last repair now unfortunately as overpaint oxidizes and cross links it becomes difficult to remove and at a certain point if the overpaint is old enough well it becomes part of the painting i can use a gelled solvent to break down some of it but ultimately this overpaint is so old that i'm not able to remove all of it and that's a problem and one that i'm going to have to figure out how to solve later on in this process perhaps the biggest distraction to this painting are the litany of superficial problems the split and this goofy patch i'm going to pry this patch up to see if i can't better integrate it into the painting i don't know if this is original from the artist or if it was a repair made later on but either way it is standing proud and it is a seam that allows us to focus on the surface of the painting and not the content it came up pretty easily which indicates that the glue bond was fairly weak i'm going to shave down some of this glue and the actual piece of wood just a little bit so that it sits more flush with the rest of the painting and doesn't become a distraction so after a little bit of work it goes in and it feels well right now i can deal with these two pieces of wood much like a magician has a magic box he uses to cut his assistant in half or a special cabinet that allows him to disappear conservators have fancy tools as well in this case i'm using the clampinator to put this panel back together it allows me to apply pressure on multiple axes to make sure that the panel is not only aligned properly with its other half that the registration is correct but that it stays in a fixed position while the glue is setting up now this crack doesn't go all the way through the panel so i have to flex the panel open a little bit and inject some adhesive into it once i've gotten enough adhesive in on and around i can flex the panel a little bit more to draw some of that adhesive into the crack and hopefully enough will go in there that when i clamp it it will be bonded back together i had toyed with splitting this panel here but when i apply the adhesive to the open joint i don't have to be worried about being terribly clean because i'm using a modified hide glue that is fully reversible and while i don't think anybody wants to remove this glue joint and split the panel making sure that the glue can be removed from the face of the painting is pretty important an epoxy or a pva wood glue may not have that same flexibility and that could be a problem in addition this modified hide glue has a long open or pot time which allows me to take my time when i'm setting up the clampinator so after putting the glue on the joints and putting these little pads with release film on them i can place downward pressure on the panel and the downward pressure is what is going to keep the two pieces of wood aligned properly that is it's going to hold the registration so that one panel doesn't end up higher than the other and create a ridge i'll do the same for the bottom and sandwich the panel's joint in between these two little blocks and that will ensure that once it's dry everything will be aligned as i like after i've done that i can start putting sideways pressure on the panel and this is what actually forces the glue joint together so the combination of these two forces will make sure that the glue joint is strong and that the registration is proper and now i wait i usually let a painting sit in the clampinator for a few days before i remove it and the way i remove it is just as important as the way i set it up i need to make sure that i'm removing the pressure evenly across the entire panel not just one piece at a time or one clamp at a time because that could create a distortion that could jeopardize the stability of the panel so removing a little bit of pressure from each one of these clamps going back and forth back and forth allows the pressure to be evenly released and even is the name of the game once it's all been released i can slide this trellis back and i can remove the painting from the clamps now of course i also have to clamp in that little patch and i'm going to do this not on the clampinator because it seems a little overkill and this is a very very small piece of wood i think i can do it with just a few hand clamps so again i'm applying the adhesive to the surfaces which have been cleaned and prepped and then i can simply slide in the little patch set it place a couple of those padded blocks down and then i can take a small c clamp and clamp it but nothing is ever that easy and maybe it's a combination of trying to do this on camera or the fact that i have become so dependent upon the clampinator but applying this little clamp is well it seems a little bit more difficult than it should be getting everything aligned and making sure that it is in the center of these blocks and that there's adequate and even pressure shouldn't be this hard maybe i need to rethink not using the clampinator for this type of procedure ultimately though i will get it done and it will be clamped and the patch will be flush with the surface with all of the major structural issues the seams addressed i can now turn my attention to the image and working to make sure that we only see the artist's work not the failure of the panel not the old conservator's work i'm going to be using a flexible chalk-based fill-in medium and this is going to be forced into all the cracks into the little chips into the seams and i do this because particularly on a flat painting like this if those seams are visible they're going to catch the light and we're going to see the surface not the image now it's much easier to overfill and then remove the excess later on than it is to try and only put the fill in medium in the little gap it's much like grouting your floor you float the entire area and then you remove the excess rather than trying to get the grout in between each individual tile and i'll do the same for this little patch making sure that those three seams are filled in and smooth now once the fill and medium has had enough time to dry i can come back and remove it and because this is a water-based chalk and and because this is a water-based material i can remove it with a little water a q-tip saturated and run over the sides of this fill-in will soften it up enough that it can be lifted off with that q-tip and once i've removed enough i'll go back over with my fingers and just make sure that it's nice and smooth your fingertips are excellent sandpaper while this is a small painting and it doesn't require massive fill-in it still takes quite a bit of time to do this the right way so sped up we can see that there was a lot of fill-in that needed to be removed but once we get all of that excess off well not that much remaining in addition to using a q-tip and my fingertips i will use a scalpel sometimes to make sure that it is nice and smooth another set of smoke and mirrors or tricks the conservator has is the use of an isolation layer and while i've mentioned that this resin can be used to protect the painting to saturate the colors so that the retouching is easier or even to fill in little imperfections that we can't get with the fill-in medium another reason is to assist in the retouching because of the type of retouching that i'm going to have to do on this painting i need a receptive base and this resin is the same that is used in the retouching paints and so it will hold onto the retouching paints very well and give me a good base onto which i can retouch while it is a small painting the retouching is actually pretty epic if you remember there was a lot of overpaint on the painting and though i tried with solvent and with mechanical means scraping i wasn't able to remove all of it safely so i had to leave it instead i'm gonna have to deal with it via retouching because as you can see it totally flattens the space not only is it ugly but it's distracting and we have to deal with that now even though i bonded these two panels together there was still a little gap where the paint had chipped off or the edges of the wood had been lost and so i filled it in with the fill-in medium i removed the excess and now i'm ready to retouch this is a relatively easy place to start there is a lot of color there is a lot of texture there's a lot to distract the eye but in this case it's still important that i keep my retouching limited to just the area where the paint was lost we saw what happens when paint is excessively applied it can become a distraction it can flatten the space or defy the artist's original intent and that's the thing about retouching we're here just to serve the artist not to make the painting better just to make the painting what it should be and so in a couple of minutes that split is all but gone like it should be i've been asked if this type of retouching small little cracks or chips or tiny little imperfections is less exciting or important than let's say retouching a torn face and certainly it's less interesting because you're not really putting back together the crux of the painting but it's just as complicated and just as difficult i'm using 25 30 different colors in just this small area there's a lot going on here and if it's not done just right well our eye will pick it up we'll see the seams so going over this small area multiple times moderating my colors changing them a little bit adding a little bit more brown making it a little bit more red making it cool and then going over it with a warm color allows me to blend in my retouching better than if i were to just choose a single color or two colors and go over it quickly it takes just as much time to retouch a small area well as it does to retouch a large area poorly so i guess what i'm saying is that though this isn't all that interesting or exciting it's still really critical and if i phone it in or if i'm not fully present and distracted or think that it's not important because it's not an eyeball well it's going to be just as detrimental to your ability to see the painting to see the forest and not the trees and so i have to keep that in mind every time i put my brush to the painting every little bit matters now in the areas where the overpaint couldn't be removed i'm gonna have to glaze in my retouching and glazing is simply a technique whereby we take multiple thin semi-transparent layers of paint and apply them on top of each other until we have reached a color or a field of color that blends in and i've switched to a larger brush because the really tiny brushes that i normally use for retouching don't glaze very well in addition i've added an extender to my paint and the extender keeps the paint wet for longer it's much like the modified hide glue it has a longer open time which allows me to blend in these thin layers better and ultimately the goal here is just to make that overpaint disappear make it go away we couldn't remove it safely so we're going to cover it up and hopefully just make it go away now the use of glazing in restoration particularly retouching is one that is grossly misunderstood oftentimes it is done to make paintings better or done when there is lots of little damage that is too painstaking to remove or too difficult to remove with a very small brush but in a case like this where there are large sections of paint that just can't be removed we really don't have any other option i mean what are we gonna do leave it well then that's all you're gonna see and our job as the conservator has failed because of course my job is to make sure that this painting survives that it's structurally sound and intact i've addressed that by bonding the panel back together i've cleaned it and removed off all of the accumulated grime but i have to work to make sure that the artist's vision is upheld and the artist did not want this blotchy overpaint on their painting that was added by somebody who didn't know any better and unfortunately it was added so long ago that it just can't be removed safely so the next best thing we have even though it is a compromise and one that is imperfect is to glaze it in and simply hide the damage now i'm using reversible paint so if in the future somebody finds a magical tool that can remove this over paint maybe lasers or robots or some crystal from outer space well they can remove the work that i'm doing now i'll document it and make sure that everybody understands what i did and where so that if they decide that what i've done well should come off it can but for now this is the best of the worst situation we have and once the retouching is complete it's time for the application of a synthetic resin uv stabilized varnish it's flexible so it won't crack it won't yellow and it will protect the painting from ambient uv but also from life itself if somebody spills something on the painting or has greasy hands when they pick it up the varnish will take a beating and it can be removed easily but most importantly varnish just makes the painting look really good the colors respond they get denser and richer and feel more alive and on a little trompoy which is all about the illusion of something being real well this matters and while it's hard to believe that anyone would think that these mallards are actually real we know intellectually that this is a painting seeing it conserved well it kind of does feel more real and both the magic and artistry have been returned all without the distraction of the smoke and mirrors you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 897,787

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

Id: tRyA4f8t1GE

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021