The Brawler - Round 1 of 3

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] pursue any craft skill trade or job long enough and a variety of experiences will present themselves some will be lovely memorable and easy and others while others will be the opposite they will be challenging frustrating and i suppose memorable but for a different reason but all of this makes the work interesting a still life of ripe fruit captured and frozen in oil forever but this painting is not still it has lived a life it has seen good and bad and the bad is why it is here in my studio today looking at this painting we can instantly spot some old work we can see textural differences and anomalies on the surface of the painting that just don't read as correct we can see overpaint all over this painting we can see areas like the berries that just don't look like they were created by the same hand as the rest of the painting we can see fill-in material errantly applied over paint on the entire background we also know that this painting was glued to a compressed cardboard with some unknown adhesive even if one were to look at this work and characterize it generously and forgivingly it can only be understood as profoundly bad and i have seen bad this may be the everest of bad and so while some paintings are cooperative easy and lovely to work on others well you know just looking at them but they're going to be difficult they're going to provide unique challenges and to some degree they are going to fight you every step of the way and so today i present to you the brawler so let the battle begin now whenever i start a project that i know is going to require a tremendous amount of work including removing any substrate like a canvas a board or wood i always face the painting and the facing is absolutely critical for a couple of reasons simply put it protects the face of the painting yes the overpaint and varnish will provide a modicum of protection but not a lot and i'm going to be handling this painting quite a bit and so this washi cozo which is a mulberry paper from japan though it is fairly thin it is incredibly strong and robust and when applied to the face of this painting with a warmed and melted fish gelatin it provides a very strong protective layer for this paint and that's important because as i work on this painting i'm going to be sliding it around on my table and i don't want to scratch the paint layer in addition this facing will hold the painting together it's kind of like when archaeologists remove dinosaur bones from the sand they first pour a plaster cast on the dinosaur bones and then excavate from underneath and that plaster cast supports cradles and protects that delicate dinosaur bone well this does kind of the same thing because we don't know what adhesive was used because we don't know the condition of the original canvas we have to assume the worst that once we start removing the old board and the old adhesive that the canvas will be completely deteriorated and that that may not in fact be holding the painting together and if that's the case this washi cozo will do the same as that plaster on the dinosaur bone if that dinosaur bone cracks the plaster holds it in place if the original canvas is completely rotted or deteriorated well this washi cozo will hold the paint in place until i can find a better support for it washi cozo mulberry paper from japan plus food grade fish gelatin from italy a two dollar bristle brush from the local hardware store and we're in business now once the washi cozo or facing has been allowed to dry for a day or two i can start thinking about removing this canvas from the board or rather removing the board from the canvas sometimes we can take the canvas off of the board by application of heat or injection of solvent but in this case it's not going to be possible and so instead of peeling off the canvas from this board i have to peel this board off of the canvas and this board is nothing a conservator would use today in fact i don't think it is something that a conservator of yesteryear would have used this is just your run-of-the-mill compressed cardboard the contents of which well it's just paper pulp unknown unverified no ph listing on the board it is not an archival product and it is wholly inappropriate for use in art conservation it's not even really appropriate for use in art making but this is what somebody chose to mount this canvas to now the saving grace here is that this board is composed of layers and as such i can use several tools a scalpel a thin flexible palette knife and a large more rigid palette knife to pry up peel back break off well just about any way i can get some of this mass off of the back and i'm not trying to take it all off at once in fact i'm just going layer by layer peeling back a little bit moving on peeling back a little bit more i'm just trying to thin this down so that when i move on to the next step there's less mass i have to contend with and this is really boring and uninteresting and kind of frustrating because every layer i peel back i just realize how ridiculous it is that somebody glued a painting to this board but that's why i get paid the big bucks to suffer i'm joking and luckily this is a relatively small painting but this is really an unpleasant thing to have to do it hurts your hands your knuckles end up getting cut up and it's just a bummer because this could have been avoided while the focus of any painting is the image and what we as the viewers see if the behind-the-scenes work the structural stuff isn't good well it's going to have a negative impact on what we do see and that's going to ruin the experience for us and that's not all that different from the way your website does or doesn't work and with squarespace you don't actually have to think about any of that structural behind-the-scenes stuff they take care of all of it for you and by letting squarespace handle all of the technical aspects of website building and maintenance it allows you to focus on what your viewers and visitors want to see your content and whether that's your business your hobby your passion your artwork that's why they're there nobody's going to your website to admire the integration of your gallery they want to see the artwork and sure you could learn to roll your own code but unless you're a masochist and like suffering like me scraping it's just easier to let squarespace handle it because that's their job and they do it phenomenally well so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com bombgartner to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain anyhow as i'm peeling back this paper i have considered using other techniques now you have seen me use a router and a router sled to remove wood from the back of a painting and unfortunately that's not going to be applicable here because the bits even though they're high speed steel they get dulled by the paper yes it's strange to think that paper can dull those bits but wood doesn't well paper does and it does very fast and it generates heat which is why the bits get dull and then when the bits get dull they don't cut they gouge and obviously gouging is not something i want in addition this board is flexible you can see it moving up and down and so if i were to run a router across this and the board flexed or bent upwards well that bit may cut right through the board or gouge and go right to the face of the painting again another thing i don't want now i've looked into using hand planes but sharpening a hand plane over and over and over again is not something that i am interested in and again they just don't cut through this paper very well you can see their brand new razor sharp scalpel still has difficulty cutting through this paper and this blade will probably be dull after i do oh maybe six square inches maybe less so i'm gonna go through a lot of scalpel blades now this board is composed of layers and the topmost layer on either side is a different color i guess they would call that the cosmetic layer to hide all of the garbage that's in between the good news here is that it gives me a reference point for when i know that i am coming up to the edge of the canvas so i can remove the mass of this gray stuff and leave the tan stuff for the scalpel now i am optimistic here that the entire painting is going to be loosely adhered to this board if that's the case well my day would be made and actually you wouldn't be watching this video because it would have been an easy project one that didn't throw a left hook and a right jab at me so spoiler alert the entirety of this painting is not loosely adhered but that there are these air pockets or areas where there wasn't good adhesion is again indicative of just how lousy this work was and just how poor of an execution it was now i mentioned that this painting is going to throw me a bunch of punches and the first is the removal of this board it's going to take a lot of work because once i've gotten the mask down i have to shave down all of this leftover gray and it's about a millimeter to two millimeters thick which is just about the limit of where my scalpel blade is effective and so once i'm done exploring this corner just trying to gain some information well i'll take that information and reflect on it and what it's telling me is that i'm not going to be able to get through this quickly or easily the adhesive is really strong and really stubborn and so i am going to have to shave down all of this board and that's really how it's done just shaving the board down slicing it off little bit by little bit and i mentioned that this will dull the blade to the point of being ineffective and dangerous after about six or so square inches so we can figure that i'm going to go through 30 or 40 maybe even more blades now the blades aren't terribly expensive but it's just a point to show how hard it is to remove this paper product now again i mentioned i'm just removing the mass of the gray if some of the tan comes off that's great but i'm not looking to get down to the canvas at this stage from my initial investigations that adhesive is tricky to say the least it's flexible and somewhat plastic yet it resists the blade and so it's not something like a rabbit skin glue that is really brittle and would just be able to be shaved right off with the scalpel blade it's something else i'm gonna have to make some tests to deduce just what that is so on to testing the adhesive i'm going to lay down a couple of different cotton swabs saturated with different adhesives just as investigatory measures they'll penetrate through that top layer of paper and hopefully they'll have an effect on this adhesive you can see the first one kind of does it is enabling me to remove some of the adhesive but not enough and really not effectively so the second one hopefully will be better and instantly i can feel and see that it is more effective it is softening up that adhesive but that adhesive is really tough and based on my experience with similar adhesives and the solvent that i'm using well i'm 100 certain that this is pva or elmer's glue and while some pvas are removable with solvent most are not particularly if they are waterborne they're just not designed to be removed they're a permanent adhesive and there are some solvents that will swell and soften pva like the one i'm using now but you can see it's just marginally effective this is not going very well and so if the first punch was having to remove all of this board manually by scraping well awaiting me underneath is an uppercut and that's the fact that this entire painting was glued to board with elmer's glue so knowing that it's elmer's and knowing the solvent that i need to use i can start actually removing it unfortunately this solvent is a real tricky beast it evaporates extremely quickly and it cannot be gelled i have tried every which way i know how i even consulted an organic chemistry professor who works at a local university to assist me a friend of mine and he informed me that much to my dismay this particular solvent will never gel at least not effectively it'll have to be diluted to a point where it's just a former shell of itself and so what i do is saturate a piece of felt lay it down and then cover it with a piece of plastic film to slow down the evaporation rate and it is not 100 effective the solvent still evaporates but what it does is provide enough exposure that the adhesive can start to swell now i have to do it in multiple passes because you saw the first pass while it allowed me to get the board remnants and the first layer of adhesive off it the adhesive evaporated too quickly and the adhesive stiffened back up so with a second pass a second exposure of solvent i can remove the adhesive down to the canvas layer but even as i'm doing this you can start to see the old adhesive dry out and get gummy or sticky and so i only have a matter of really seconds or minutes after i peel back the plastic film to remove this old adhesive before it starts stiffening up again now yes i can reapply the solvent and start over but that takes a lot of time and given the amount of time that i've already spent on this piece and the amount of time i know i'm going to have to spend on this piece i would like to not make it a longer relationship because this well this is not a loving relationship this painting has thrown me an uppercut in the form of elmer's glue and i have to absorb it and just keep fighting on but the good news is that i can remove this adhesive i can remove the old pva or elmer's glue all the way down to the canvas and while it's a slow process i would say that for each of these squares of felt it takes a good 15 minutes of exposure to remove the first layer and then another 15 minutes of exposure to remove the second layer and then probably another 10 minutes on a third pass to clean up the little bits so it is about a 30 to 40 minute process to remove one of these three inch by five inch areas of adhesive now extrapolate that over the entirety of this painting and you can see how much time is going to be required suffice it to say i am in this for the long haul whether i like it or not this painting is going to fight me all along the way and so while the removal of this adhesive from the back of this canvas is slow and arduous and unpleasant and not something that i'm terribly excited about doing that the results are positive and that they are what i am after well that gives me some comfort it allows me to take solace in the fact that the work that i'm doing will have a positive impact on this painting now over the past 20 plus years i have probably scraped for a large portion of my life probably more than i care to remember and the one benefit is it has given me a muscle memory this skill is something that is kind of ingrained in my bones it is highly coveted and i travel the world go to fairs and freak shows and museums to demonstrate my scraping skills i no i mean actually that's not true at all nobody cares that i'm good at scraping glue off of surfaces maybe just you the audience but really outside of conservation it's not a terribly marketable skill but within conservation and within my field of painting conference conservation it is incredibly important because having that muscle memory allows me to move through this really fast i know how to scrape i feel it there's a way of holding the scalpel of moving my arm at the elbow of slightly tilting my wrist to adjust the angle of attack of the blade and all of that combined together i don't think about that anymore it just happens automatically and the reason i'm talking about this is because when i first started and scraping was one of the things that i was tasked with doing or punished by my father scrape this painting you'll enjoy it right famous last words it took me forever a painting of this size might have taken several weeks for me to scrape because i was moving at a snail's pace and not because i was doing a better job but i just didn't know how to scrape and i was nervous and scared and so every time the blade touched the canvas it was as if i was handling radioactive plutonium or something i was super super careful and to some degree that was a paralysis and as i did it more just like as anybody does anything over a period of their lifetimes it becomes automatic and they don't have to think about it anymore it becomes part of them and not only do they gain the ability to move faster but they gain the ability to move better and so obviously everybody knows that if you do something over and over and over again well that's called practice you get better with it and this is the same thing it seems exotic or super high stakes but you know if you have spent 70 80 90 200 hours scraping well you're gonna be better at scraping than if you've only scraped for 25 minutes and so what looks on camera like something that's just crazy a scalpel on the back of canvas really for me is just kind of automatic and well not all that interesting or complicated so once i have removed the mass of that glue i'm going to go back and really quickly just glide over the surface of this canvas to remove any extra residues just little bits of glue that are still sticking up i'm using almost no pressure here just letting the blade slide along the surface of the canvas again something that i have refined over years of doing it something that in the beginning well this would have taken me a full day and so with all of this paper and board removed and with all of the adhesive removed we can start to see what the canvas looks like and of course there's a curveball and another punch this canvas is not going to be cooperative and at some point before it was glued to that board with elmer's glue well somebody painted white lead all over all of the areas of damage on the canvas why they chose white lead well i can only think that somewhere somebody is laughing in their grave at the conservator that first had to scrape off all of the board then scrape off all of the elmer's just to find goops and globs of white lead waiting for them little landmines planted deep underground and i have to remove this stuff because it's texturally different than the canvas it's built up if it were just white lead smears or stains it wouldn't really matter to me but because it's built up and you can feel it well that's a problem because if i don't remove this those areas are going to telegraph to the front of the painting and then my conservation work will be no better than what was done previously so using another suite of solvents this time designed to break down paint some really aggressive stripping chemicals i can remove this white lead first i have to put it on and let it swell and soften that can take 10 or 15 minutes then i scrape it and then i clean off the residue now you'll notice that there is still some paint embedded into the canvas i'm not going to bother removing that because at this point it's smooth it's flat and because this painting is going to get aligning there are some pretty significant areas of damage and this canvas isn't structurally sound anymore nobody's ever gonna see this canvas so it's not really a concern to make it cosmetically beautiful i just need to make it structurally sound and make it so that when i do the lining we don't have any telegraphing to the front so moving in supersonic speed i am removing this white lead and you can see that it does come off in fact much of it comes off completely and that's great because if it didn't well that would be another problem i would have to deal with now i have come to a point where all of the stuff on the back of the painting has been removed the old cardboard the elmer's glue the white lead the canvas is raw and exposed and i'm going to do what i call a vapor treatment and that is a technique whereby using heat moisture and pressure i can flatten and relax that canvas and doing it on my table here will make sure that the canvas is as flat as possible it's important because it does a couple of things it removes some of those waves and bulges that were in the painting but it also establishes a baseline so to speak and that enables the paint on the surface of the painting to return to its natural state that is any impasto will come back if it has been depressed so onto the hot table heat it up pressure cooled underweights and after a couple of days the painting is out now this canvas had some significant damage to it lots of holes lots of gouges lots of nicks and i need to make sure that those are filled in because if i don't when i do the interleaved lining those will become divots on the face of the painting the pressure of the vacuum table will force the paint to sink down wherever there is a missing piece of canvas now at times i have used washi cozo to build up these areas but in this case i am using a synthetic fill-in material and this fill-in material is based around the same adhesive that i'm going to use for the interleaved lining and that matters because it's going to allow a really good bond it's also going to melt when it is exposed to heat and conform to the shape wherever the canvas is missing so i'm going to apply it smooth it out as best i can it doesn't need to be super super accurate i'm just looking to fill in all of these areas where the canvas is missing i could try to cut little patches and inlay them but they're never going to fit perfectly and that would become a problem for the surface so by using this fill-in medium i can kind of plaster over or patch these areas with a solid material at least once it's dry it'll be solid and then when the painting is lined these areas won't become divots so once the fill-in material has been allowed to dry it turns white and i can use a solvent to remove the excess so simply going over the area we will see that the extra material that is around the fill in will dissolve and get picked up by the cotton and this again just like on the front is important because i don't want to put material where it shouldn't be but i also don't want to leave extra material that could create a bump or a bulge on the face so now that area is filled in i will continue this process for all of these areas and you may be asking why didn't i just coat the entire back of the painting well this filling medium is expensive and it is not designed for that and so if i did that it probably wouldn't react the way i want during this interleaved lining process now an interleaved lining is whereby the original canvas is mounted to a rigid substrate and then to a new piece of canvas and that interleave in this case a heavy gauge pet film provides a couple of benefits one it provides a little bit more rigidity for the original canvas so that it's not so soft and flopping around it also immobilizes the canvas and that means that when humidity changes the canvas isn't going to absorb that humidity expand and then contract when it dries out and limiting those micro movements is absolutely critical to making sure that any of these tears or holes don't open back up so i'm going to apply a heat activated adhesive that's been warmed up and using a roller i can achieve good coverage and i'm using a gossamer matrix here and it's that kind of transparent opaque fabric that's sitting on top of the canvas and the reason that i'm doing that is that this gossamer will fill in some of those little micro divots and it will also hold a little bit more adhesive this really isn't necessary if the original canvas is smooth and flat and free of issues but when you have a canvas that's been so abused and damaged as this one this is kind of i don't want to say a crutch but it is a little bit more support and it enables a better final lining process it allows for more adhesive to be there and it allows for some of those little deflections to be filled in without having to add another layer of fill-in material in addition this nylon also will hold on to the canvas really well and make sure that there is a complete bond between the canvas and the pet film unlike the bond we saw from the board to the canvas where there were gaps and air pockets this will not have that we will have a complete uniform bond which is really critical into not only making sure that this canvas is supported but making sure that there's no movement and that any of the areas that we're going to take great care to put back together start to fail or deteriorate because movement in a canvas can cause fill-in medium to crack and break loose and tears in holes to open back up and i will apply the same adhesive to the front and back of the pet film and one thing that you might notice when i'm rolling on the adhesive is that when i come to the ends sometimes i will lift up the roller and let it spin that's an old printmaking technique that i learned to achieve even and uniform distribution of ink by lifting it and letting the roller spin a little bit when you put it back down it doesn't align with where it was lifted up in the first place so once i have covered both sides with the adhesive i can let this dry that'll take overnight and then i can move on to starting to put this painting back together and that's what we're going to see in the next episode and there is an add and sponsor free version of this episode that comes out ahead of the one on youtube available for my patreons in addition when this project is all complete i will answer their questions in a follow-up video so go check that out if you're at all curious thanks for watching and stay tuned to see what happens next

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 506,168

Rating: 4.9594383 out of 5

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Id: PR7PcyLnxw0

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021