The Bold and Beeautiful

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] well hello how are you well you're in my conservation studio so probably not doing all that well well let's take a look and see if we can't figure out what's brought you here well the first thing that i notice is that the varnish on this painting is uneven it's blotchy some spots are shiny some spots are matte i also see some planar distortions or dents for those who don't speak conservator i can also see areas where there's some old retouching maybe indicating some damage or at least some paint loss as we go over the face i can see up in her hair a tear that's been repaired we'll have to deal with that too now the painting looks like it's in pretty good condition at least her face has avoided the majority of the damage but the rest of the painting is not so great the raking light can reveal all sorts of problems and if we take a closer look at that tear we can see the ghost of a patch a rectangle bulging through the surface now the tacking edge is not as bad as it could be but it's pretty worn thin and i'm concerned that this isn't going to provide adequate support for the painting when we go ahead to stretch it later on we'll have to address that and the back of the painting is covered in wax which appears to have been an ill-fated attempt at stabilizing the painting and of course there is a huge square patch right over the inscription a big big no-no and we're definitely gonna have to take care of that there's just no way that we can accept a patch on an inscription but by large she looks pretty good and she's rocking this pretty awesome bee earring which i'm sure has to do with hard work and piety but i don't know seems a little punk rock to me and as we take a look under blacklight and i trace the areas of retouching in blue well those are pretty obvious they are fluorescing very powerfully and that's all paint that was added during the last conservation and you can see that it's pretty excessive we can see some of the areas of damage and how much overpaint was added to cover them up none of this is okay and we're going to have to figure out a way to remove and address this properly in addition i'm highlighting in red some areas on her face that look a little strange but are not retouching i'm also going to highlight some areas in green that read odd but again are not retouching learning to read a black light and discern what is and isn't retouching from areas that just naturally fluoresce or areas of old varnish or just accumulated dirt and grime well it's kind of an art and it confuses those who haven't been doing it for very long and so welcome to baumgartner fine art restoration we're going to take care of all of these issues we're going to put you back together and send you on your way and make sure that indeed you are bold and beautiful now this painting is actually fairly stable it's not flaking or deteriorating in any major way so i don't need to apply any facing i can start removing it from the stretcher right away and that begins by prying out all of these old tacks now some of them will come out in one piece and some of them well they'll break in half the heads will pop off but the shaft will remain and that's not really the end of the world because i'm not going to save these i'm going to replace them but i do have to be mindful when that happens because the shaft can still grab onto the canvas and hold it onto the stretcher and just make it a little bit more difficult to remove it from the stretcher now keeping that in mind when i do go to peel back the stretcher from the canvas i go slowly and i make sure that the canvas is fully detached from the support just to make sure that it's not going to catch or tear or wrinkle or otherwise get damaged now with the painting removed i can see that on the back between the canvas and stretcher some dust and dirt has accumulated and i'm just gonna brush that stuff off to clean it up now i can start to remove the patch and this begins with a razor sharp brand new scalpel blade and i mentioned that because sometimes i'll use a dulled or old blade when i'm scraping off adhesive from the back of the canvas but in this case i actually want to slice off this patch now the adhesive here is not reversible so i can't just saturate this patch with solvent and peel it up in addition this patch is on top of the inscription and i don't want to run the risk that any solvent would damage that inscription because that's really really important so using a scalpel gives me well surgical precision i can remove just the patch i can scrape it down to the glue layer without running risk of damaging the inscription and that is super important when it comes to removing or changing something on a painting precision is key because i don't want to have a blunt tool i want to just affect change where i need to you know like when you're editing a website i know what you're thinking what do scalpel blades have to do with website editing well with squarespace surgical precision is the name of the game yes you can go into the control panel and change something like the typeface on the entire site with one click of a button but you can also get granular or surgical in your editing and change one particular section individually and that gives you more freedom and control over your website you get to make the decisions and if you want to add something well their templates are just the starting point again you can control every aspect of them and give your website your personality make it feel and represent who you are 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 so back to this surgical scalpel scraping it is a small patch and for that i am grateful because it is time-consuming tedious and stressful because one slip of this scalpel blade and i could cut the canvas or i could remove part of this inscription and that would be very very bad so i'm going to keep on scraping delicately until i've removed as much of the adhesive as i can and then once i have decided or determined that the scalpel is no longer the right tool for the job i'm going to switch to another tool and the fancy tool i'm switching to is just a cotton swab with some solvent now this adhesive is not reversible i mentioned that earlier and i think it is a contact cement now i can somewhat soften up this contact cement with the right solvent it doesn't remove it and i don't want to abrade the canvas or the inscription but the interesting thing about this adhesive is that once it gets activated it gets kind of gummy and i can sort of rub and roll the adhesive off the surface and then those areas that have come off those little balls or chunks of adhesive that are now gummy and sticky well they help attract the other adhesive that's still on the surface and so they become a tool in removing the adhesive that's still there i know it sounds kind of funny but as i'm rubbing this canvas you can see the adhesive picking itself up and so i'm turning what would be a drawback into an asset and once i have removed the entirety of that adhesive we can see that the inscription well the inscription is saved and legible the next step is removing all of that accumulated wax that was poured on the surface probably in an attempt to stabilize the painting because that was something that used to be done but is wholly ineffective the wax just sits on the surface it doesn't ever penetrate through the canvas and it doesn't stabilize anything so i can add some heat and soften up that wax and then i can start removing it with a solvent there's nothing fancy or tricky about this once the wax is soft it's vulnerable to the solvent and it becomes well liquidy and so i can take some cotton swabs saturated with solvent and just start removing this wax now this is an easier way of removing the wax than scraping it's less harmful on the canvas and it is also fairly quick which is why i like it now the one drawback is that some of this wax does stay on the canvas and so i'm going to need to extract it as the next step so once i've removed the mass of the wax i will set my hot table up to extract the remainder and that all begins with a piece of absorbent cotton blotter paper and i'll flip the canvas over and on the front is a piece of silicone release film because remember the painting hasn't been cleaned and so the varnish is still on the surface and even though i'm not using a ton of heat that natural resin varnish can soften up with exposure to heat and if i don't use this siliconize film well it could stick and that would be really problematic because it could peel up the paint from the painting and we don't want that to happen so i'll set up the hot table i'll get my cotton webbing surrounding the painting which allows me to extract the air and then i'll create the envelope which allows me to apply pressure onto the face of this painting and once i turn the hot table on and start extracting that air you will see that the film presses the surface of the painting and makes good contact with the blotter paper and the heat is going to draw that wax out and the pressure is going to keep the painting flat now it's time to start cleaning the painting the patch has been removed the wax has been removed and now we can start removing that old varnish i mentioned that i had put a release film on the face of the painting so that the varnish didn't stick well it's important and it was really good that i did because this varnish did soften up a bit and you can see it's extra shiny because of the contact with the release film now taking a swab and solvent i can start to remove the varnish and i'm always asked how i know if the varnish has been fully removed because usually it's clear well number one i can see with my eyes that there is a sheen difference the area where the varnish has been removed is dull i can hear the difference and i can smell it too now in this area i'm starting to reveal some of that old retouching that i highlighted when i blacklit the painting and this is relatively small amount of damage it's not that big and the over painting that was on this area well that was big somebody had just taken a fairly wide brush and just kind of blended in the entire area that's certainly easier and it is effective but it's just not the right way to do it and here we can see again an area where there has been paint loss it's been filled in all of that is appropriate but instead of using a small brush and just placing paint where paint is missing i used a big brush and just kind of painted over the entire area and it doesn't seem like that's a big deal because this is the background but the background is still part of the painting the artist made deliberate choices on that background and wanted it to look a specific way and so to take an editorial liberty and change that well that's just not something that conservators do again here i'm removing more over paint this whole area was over painted and if i sound like a broken record well it's a theme because as i start to clean her coat you can see that my swab is going from white to black and that's because the entirety of this coat has been over painted you guessed it there were some little areas of damage little nicks and chips there were also some larger areas where there had been some paint loss and instead of just dealing with those areas they decided to just glaze in or over paint the whole thing and that may be because they were lazy it may be because this was too difficult or it may be because mixing this particular shade of black is really tricky and an easier way of doing it is just to kind of glaze in and feather in the entire area because you know it's black and black is black and nobody cares right well wrong there are details in this coat that are completely covered by this over painting and now onto the face again an area that i knew had overpainting reveals well nothing that would warrant that kind of treatment and the one thing that i am grateful for here is that the overpainting comes off with relative ease and the damage that i'm finding is relatively minor sometimes when removing overpaint you never know what you're going to find underneath sometimes you find a small little chip and a large area of overpaint sometimes you find that there is just bare canvas and that the damage is extreme and there really isn't any way of knowing one from the other without some really advanced imaging that while interesting and fun to play with is beyond the reach of most clients we certainly can't do several thousand dollars worth of analysis for a painting that isn't going to warrant that investment of resources so sometimes we go blind into conservation we know that something was done excessively we know we have to remove it we hope that what we find is not as bad as what we kind of anticipate or expect but sometimes you never know and you take the good with the bad some paintings you find a pleasant surprise and some well they make you work for it now as you can see as i'm cleaning her face she's really actually quite attractive and her skin tones are much more delicate than they appeared before the old varnish that has deteriorated over time with exposure to natural light and the uv that's in it with exposure to oxygen and other surface grimes has well darkened it's gotten yellow it's gotten brown it's gotten muddy and all of that has changed the appearance the tone the tenor of this painting and of the sitter and so by removing this old varnish we can start to see not only what she really looked like but what the artist wanted out of this painting we can see their brush work we can see how they mix the color on the palette and then on the canvas those are all signatures of the artist and they're important to see they teach us about the artist their decision-making process and frankly it's why we like paintings now some have argued that this yellowed varnish is a patina and that it adds to an error of age and beauty to the painting but unlike furniture that's just not the case paintings don't have patinas they have dirt they have discolored varnish and the artist chose this material because that's what was available to them at the time they didn't choose this old varnish knowing that it would deteriorate and yellow up this beautiful painting they chose this varnish because that's what they had access to and this varnish well it's a fallible material it changes over time nobody's at fault it just is what it is and so the idea that we would leave this old material that has failed that the artist didn't know would fail on the painting and let it change the painting entirely well that betrays the artist's original vision that changes what they wanted out of this painting and what they wanted us the viewer to experience when looking at this painting and so by removing this old varnish that has failed and deteriorated we can go back in time we can start to reveal what the artist actually wanted and as conservators that's our job and as lovers of art well that's our treat to see a painting as the artist wanted that's pretty special now that the painting has been cleaned we can start to address the structural issue and one of the complications here is that this tear goes right through the inscription and so while i would normally use bridging which is a very lightweight method of stabilizing a torn canvas i don't want to cover up any of this inscription not to mention this canvas is actually well bonded together the old overpaint that was used has actually adhered these broken pieces of canvas together so the amount of structural work i need to do is relatively minimal i just need to make sure that this canvas doesn't come apart so i'm using a thermoplastic welding powder which is really just very very small beads of thermoplastic adhesive i'll lay it on the tear and then using my tacking iron i will melt them over the tear and once they are melted they will bond to the canvas and they will hold that canvas together this canvas is not under extreme tension so i don't have to worry about this running and canvas doesn't run like a nylon stocking it's not going to open up because it's bonded together because of that old overpaint and so here i'm just adding a little bit of extra support to make sure it stays flat and stays together and the benefit here is that this repair is really really minimal it is almost invisible and it doesn't affect the surrounding inscription which is of paramount importance i wouldn't want to do anything like put a big patch that would cover up that inscription and make it impossible to read so using this welding powder it allows me to stabilize and secure this tear while still keeping the inscription fully visible and that is a win now among the other structural issues that i need to address on this painting is the tacking edge it's weakened and frayed and i'm not confident that it will support the painting when i stretch it so i need to do a strip lining and if you hadn't noticed this painting is not square it is oval and that complicates the addition of a strip lining just a little bit so i've made a template on some craft paper and now i'm using some very very advanced trigonometry to find the approximate middle of this oval this is graduate level stuff here so take note now once i've creased the paper and i have the approximate middle i'll make some lines as reference points and then i can start laying out a guide so to speak and this guide is going to govern the pieces of canvas that i use for the strip lining i've chosen four inches because that is a dimension that looks like it's going to work if it doesn't i can change to a different size and now i can start laying out the canvas on this template marking it and cutting it and the lines that i'm drawing now radiate from the center point and so when i cut the canvas along these lines trim up both ends and lay it down everything should line up and i shouldn't have any overlap now fingers crossed that i did this right looks like i did a plus now the first time that i did this my father looked at me and laughed and he said this is ridiculous you are spending so much time why don't you just do it and i said well i don't know how to do it and he looked at me and he said oh that's right because you don't know anything i was 19 and he was right i didn't know anything and i don't often do this technique unless it's a very complex shape because by now after two decades of doing this well like my father i can just do it but i wanted to show you an example of how i got to this point of being able to just do it and this is how i taught myself using this template method and so using my iron i can attach the canvas with a heat activated reversible adhesive once i've ironed it i will use my steel weight with the red oak block underneath to absorb any excess moisture and prevent the canvas from distorting and as i go along the edges the pieces of canvas that i have cut will line up perfectly there won't be any overlaps and that's actually really important because any overlaps would create a bulge on the face of the painting so all of these pieces are cut to size and they're all four inches wide and again that matters because it provides even grab and distribution on the painting if some were really small and some were really large it would be uneven and it would also look ridiculous and i like things to look good i know it's on the back of the painting but i'm still responsible for the back and so i want to make sure that my work looks good so with the strip lining all adhered to the canvas i can go ahead and stretch it actually i'm not going to stretch it just yet while i have the canvas flat because this painting is super smooth i'm going to fill in the areas of loss and i'm going to do that now because i can put pressure on the canvas while it's on the table as opposed to when it's stretched when it's stretched i have to be more careful of how much pressure i put on the canvas because i don't want to create any dents or just stress it unnecessarily but when it's on the table well i can put more pressure because it's on the table the canvas isn't going to distort now these small areas of paint need to be filled in because this is a smooth painting if i don't fill these in we're going to have all of these little divots and we're going to see that so i'll overfill the entire area because it's much easier and much more effective in getting a smooth surface to do it this way than to try to fill in each individual spot i've learned that the hard way once the fill in is dry i will come back with some swabs and i'll just start removing the overfill again this is super important because it's not my job to add material or paint where there exists the original i'm just trying to fill in the areas that have been lost and so i will remove as much of the fill-in material as i can including any and all areas that are on the existing paint and once i've done that well then i'll be ready to move on to the next step and now we can stretch the painting now stretching an oval or round painting isn't inherently all that different from stretching a rectilinear painting it's just slightly different now just like with any stretcher i want to make sure that this doesn't move here my concern isn't that this support will go out of square because well it ain't my concern is that it will distort or open up as i am hammering the tacks in so i put some nails in through the joints to keep it stable and solid now aligning the painting on this oval stretcher isn't any different than a square stretcher but because there are no corners i don't have four hard reference points i need to go around the entirety of the painting and make sure that it lines up at every point rotating it a little bit shifting its orientation a little bit until i'm satisfied that it's where i want it and then at that point i can take some binder clips and some felt protecting the painting and clip and hold the painting in place and this is important because if it moves i may not notice it until later and i've maybe tacked half the painting and then i'd have to start over so using tacks i will start to drive them in to the sides and i'm gonna put one tack two tacks maybe three at each of the four sides i know that an oval doesn't really have sides but i have to find sides because i need to create a tight center of the painting and that's done by pulling from opposite ends and so i have identified the top and bottom left and right as the points into which i'm going to drive a couple of tacks pull the canvas taut and make sure that the center of this painting is tight and without waves or ripples probably the hardest thing about dealing with an oval painting is that it wants to rotate all the time it's an oval of course so it's always moving and driving in the tax is a little bit more difficult because you don't have an opposing force like a flat table to resist against luckily it's not the end of the world and i can manage and just like on any other painting i will work from side out and towards the other areas that i've tacked now on this painting it seems a little bit more confusing because it's oval but it's really not i'm just making sure that as i go along on this tacking edge i add some pressure and make sure that the painting is taut and now this is where it does get a little different in cleaning up the back now the easiest thing to do would be just cut all of this canvas off but that's not how i like to do it and i like a challenge so i'm starting with the longest sides which are longer than four inches these are maybe seven inches or eight inches wide and i'm going to tack these down these are going to be my reference points and then i'm going to work from each end of these to the top and bottom of the painting i know it sounds super confusing because up is down left is right but as i do this it should all make sense i'm going to fold in the edge and then add attack and if i do this right all of these folds will be crisp and clean and the excess canvas will create a nice even line so i'm going to pull it taut the canvas gives a little bit and conforms to the shape just a little bit once i've made sure it's taut i'll drive attack just to hold it in place and this tack will be hidden nobody'll ever see this and then i can take the next piece fold it over tuck in the corner create an overlap and then drive that in with another tack that will be visible and again if i do this right and i manage not to hammer the tack into my fingertip everything will look pretty tidy so i'm going to go and do all of these areas in super speed because once you've seen one well you don't need to see all of them now when i come to the last piece i'm going to make a couple of cuts and i'm going to continue working the way i have fold tuck and tack tack this little piece in but then i'm going to jump to the other side fold tuck and tack make sure the whole thing is nice and tidy and then that will leave me this final keystone piece i'll fold tuck and tack these in and then the entire thing will look very orderly and neat now this is a keyable support and so i have to key it out the original keys were broken and lost so i decided to make some new ones and because this is an oval stretcher i decided to round off the edges why not i think it looks nice so i'm going to hammer them in add some tension onto this support make sure that the canvas has nice even tension all the way across and then i'm going to go ahead and secure these keys now i've received many comments about the fallibility of the fishing line that i use i haven't seen it in 20 plus years but i'm always open to trying new things so in this case i'm using some kevlar thread instead of fishing line which may sound overkill but you know why not it works the same way i thread it through wrap it around attack hammer it in the only thing i found is that this kelvar is very hard on my tools including my scissors so i don't know the jury's still out now on to the isolation coat and i'm putting it on this painting because i have blacks and greens to mix for my retouching and blacks and greens are a little bit more difficult than some other colors and so this is going to allow me to see them as they will be when the final varnish is applied i know it sounds super confusing and super complicated but basically here's the gist the painting is pretty dry and varnish saturates up those colors makes them look a little bit richer if i retouch according to the way the painting looks when it's dry when i do put the final varnish on well my retouching won't look right it will be the wrong shade so by putting on this isolation coat and saturating up those colors now making them richer when i apply my retouching when my retouching colors are wet i can ensure that they match this look and then when i apply the final varnish everything should look well just like this now yes my retouching colors will lighten up a bit as they dry but the final varnish once applied will resaturate them but because the original paint has this layer of resin on it it won't saturate again i don't know if that actually makes sense maybe if you listen to it again it does it makes sense in my head but effectively what i'm trying to do is simulate what the painting is going to look like when it gets its final varnish so that when i do my retouching it's more accurate saves me time and gives a better result for my client and of course this resin is synthetic and fully reversible now on to my favorite and least favorite part of conservation retouching favorite because it's the point at which the painting starts to come together life is brought back to the image but it's not my favorite because it's really hard matching colors is difficult and matching them consistently well that's also difficult there are some days when your color sense is just spot on when the light is right when your mood is is just attuned to retouching and then there are days when everything stinks generally you learn to spot those days when things are going well and when things are not and take action accordingly if i'm not in the mood to retouch while i don't retouch if my color sense is off while i go scrape if things are going well then i tackle paintings that are difficult this painting is not terribly difficult although some of these green brown colors are a little tricky to retouch and because there is so much retouching that is very fine well it's a little tricky again i'm trying not to just blend in and glaze over the original paint but just to add paint where the areas need it that is those areas of fill-in and this isn't particularly difficult but it's also not particularly easy and so once i've achieved what i think is a good result on a fairly inconsequential area that as i've warmed up that's my practice round i'll switch over to an area that's much more important a focal point like the eye and i've switched to a smaller brush because well this damage is much smaller and i want to make sure that i'm not adding paint to the painting where it exists already now i know that sounds kind of ridiculous because there's almost no way that i can guarantee that the paint that i add doesn't slightly overlap the original and that's okay i'm not using a single hair brush because that's not effective it's just not something that would make my work any better and it probably would make it worse because i'd be frustrated and angry and resentful at having to retouch with a single hair brush so yes when i do add paint tiny tiny areas of the original are covered up and that's unfortunate but it is what it is i'm not deliberately trying to overpaint anything and the amount of the original painting that is covered is so miniscule that it has no appreciable effect on the image keep in mind that this brush that i'm using is a two over zero brush so it is basically like a very very thin eyeliner pencil maybe even thinner the tip of it is like a sharpened pencil so we're talking about microns getting covered up by my retouching paint now in an area like this on the cheek where i couldn't get off all of that retouching at least not safely you always have to draw a line between removing everything that was added and running risk of removing some of the original i'm going to retouch over it and in this case i am covering up some of the original paint but that was covered up by that additional retouching and in this case i just want to make the old retouching go away i can do it better and that's the job i want to make it just look natural like there was no damage there ever not like i'm trying to cover up anything or that anybody had ever worked there in the past i just want it to disappear and that's what i'm working towards and in this area where the painting has been damaged and abraded you can see some of those little areas of lighter color to the left and the right of the damage i guess that's where somebody scraped or over cleaned it i have to do a little bit more extensive retouching because if i just retouched the hole well you're still going to see the area around the hole that's been damaged so i'm kind of breaking it up disguising it and every time i pull my brush off the canvas and i go back to my palette i'm changing the color slightly because the more diverse colors that i use the more it blends if i only had two colors well my options are limited but if i have 20 i can get a better effect of making all of this kind of blend in and disappear which again is the ultimate goal just make it look natural like there was no damage in this place ever with my retouching all complete i can move on to varnishing and i am brushing this on because it's a small painting i don't need to spray it and i'm not pouring the varnish directly on the painting because it's a lot easier to add more varnish to the painting than it is to remove varnish from the painting so i've charged my brush i've applied the varnish and that's just about it now once i have applied the varnish and then started to let it tack up i'm going to begin brushing it out as the solvent evaporates from the varnish it starts to get thicker or stickier and i can go over the surface back and forth in different directions and create a very fine micro texture and this gives me a really beautiful effect and you've seen me do this many times before but on this painting i want to do something a little bit different so once i have brushed it out to a state that i'm happy with i'll switch over to my badger brush and i'm going to start to dipple the surface just going over the entirety of the painting and making little dabs and again much like brushing out the varnish this adds a micro texture and it gives me a really really beautiful satin finish i can't do this any other way and this is not something that i would do on a really large painting but i think that it's going to be perfect for this painting so with all of my work complete let's revisit what the painting looked like patch on top of the inscription and the back covered with wax and when i'm done with it we can read the inscription painted for am cozens 1866 and the wax while it's nowhere to be found under blacklight we could see all of the retouching really excessive for minimal damage totally inappropriate but my retouching much more constrained much more reserved and only the areas where the paint has been lost has new paint been applied and of course here she is up front she looks good but not great but with my work complete well she looks fantastic we can see her as the artist wanted us to see her and we can get an idea of who she really was she has a piercing gaze she's rocking a pretty rad b earring and now she has a portrait to match her personality bold and beautiful you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 724,682

Rating: 4.9585009 out of 5

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: X1tQxutMcWI

Length: 42min 1sec (2521 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021