The Brawler - Round 3 of 3

this video is brought to you by brightsellers the monthly wine subscription that will help you discover wines you'll love [Music] last time i spent the entirety of the video cleaning the painting removing the surface grime the old varnish the old retouching the old over painting and remove i did because this entire painting was covered in overpaint in fact it was treated like a paint by numbers and all of that bad work had to be removed including all of the old fill-in material which was so uneven it was like a mountain range with valleys and peaks now in the process i discovered an additional signature and i'll talk about that later on but before that i had to get the painting ready for retouching including filling in stretching and applying an isolation layer and generally getting the painting and myself ready to go toe to toe for round three with the brawler two titans at the peak of their prowess step into the ring for the third and final round of a battle to last the age oh come on who am i kidding this is not a fight i am not trying to beat this painting into submission though up until this point it may have seemed that way in fact i'm trying to do the exact opposite i'm trying to save this painting to restore it to its former glory to what the artist wanted so that we can enjoy it in the future unfortunately this painting doesn't know that i mean how could it it's an inanimate object it doesn't know anything it has no opinions whatsoever and so my focus isn't on the painting it's really on the old work but that too has no opinion so maybe my real adversary is the person that did all of this bad work to this painting but i've said enough about that oh who am i kidding i've got a couple more choice comments up my sleeve whenever i embark upon a retouching that has a lot ahead of me i always like to selectively choose where i start i could certainly start with probably the lowest of hanging fruits pun intended i suppose with the brown background but that's pretty boring and it's not really all that engaging and actually doing a solid color is deceptively difficult it's really hard to match and make it look natural so i'll choose an area that is interesting somewhat challenging but an area that i know i can easily retouch and that's why i've settled on this leaf for the first part of the retouching yes there is some significant damage and it is impressive but all things considered this is not a terribly complicated area to retouch and luckily enough for me there are other leaves that i can use to guide me through what this one probably looked like yes i don't know exactly what it looked like but we're just trying to put the image together and so using the other leaves as a cue i think i can work my way through this now notching an early win in any project that is big or challenging or just seemingly impossible to conquer is super important getting some early victories puts some wind in your sails and it makes the upcoming challenges seem less formidable for you know you've already achieved some success early on you can just extrapolate that if you maintain that focus that attention to detail and replicate your working process that the victory will come in the other parts yes it's a little bit more complicated than simply saying easy win equals difficult wins but starting off somewhere that you know you're going to do a good job it'll make you feel more confident and so that's why i've started with this leaf because i'm fairly confident that i can knock this one out fairly quickly and then move on to more challenging areas now one of the questions that i'm sure everybody has is how this painting got so damaged well as far as i understand this painting has been owned by the family since the beginning they apparently got it directly from rosen or at least that's the family lore and i mentioned lore because you know like a game of telephone these things change and so maybe it was remembered as having been bought directly from rosen or maybe that's just how it was passed on to somebody whose memory then evolved in any event the painting had been owned well since the beginning prominently displayed and enjoyed and at some point it came down off the wall and went into storage under a bed certainly not the ideal place for a painting to be stored but better than a dirty garage a moldy basement or a sweltering attic and for a long time the painting was fine under the bed until a plumber who was doing work on the house i guess put some pipes under the bed and went right through the painting no fault to the plumber he didn't know it was there so the family took this painting to an individual who fancied themselves a conservator and particularly a conservator of rosen paintings because in this town rosen paintings were ubiquitous and the family can't really be faulted for this because they had no experience with conservation and they trusted the individual who told them to trust him and so this individual did terrible no good very bad things to this painting and you have seen them all in the previous episode and without haranguing too much on this poor soul i just want to mention that there is a really big difference between antiquated work and bad work oftentimes you hear me complain about old work and point out its failures but that's not because the practitioners were ill-informed or doing bad things that's just because they had fallible materials and over time those materials degraded so we judge that work based on the time it was executed not today's standards but then there's this work which well there's nothing i can say here on air that will be acceptable or polite so let's just quickly move on so as this leaf comes together and i finish working on this i guess a green apple you can see that the image is starting to coalesce it's starting to make sense certainly beforehand it was just a gloopy gloppy mess but now not so bad so after notching an early wind getting some wind in my sails with the leaf i am ready to move on to more difficult and challenging areas of retouching like the peaches and the berries higher hanging fruit if you will but with no examples next door how am i supposed to figure out what was there when there is nothing to work from so i found a whole bunch of rosen paintings and i printed them off and i'm going to take them and mount them onto a foam board on the second easel beside my retouching easel and as we take a close look at some of these paintings we can see just how beautifully they were painted how lush and how vibrant and i think these are going to be very helpful the only thing that i'm noticing is that all of these paintings have a glass of wine which right now after doing all of this work going two rounds with this brawler that sounds really good right about now and that's where i turn to bright sellers where you can discover wine you love so how does it work well you head over to their website and you take a super simple seven 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the leaf successfully i'm ready to start working on a more difficult part of the painting that's the peaches and the peaches are more difficult because well they were painted with more care more detail there is more blending and shading on these and of course they are right smack dab in the middle of the painting so they are a superstar they are a main feature not supporting cast so everybody's gonna see them and the first thing i do is just start color blocking and laying down some paint to define shape and form and i'm not terribly detailed here in fact i'm not all that concerned if the color matches that much because i'm going to go over it repeatedly really all i'm trying to do is define what i need to retouch and experiment with my color sense lay down a pink and see if it's too warm or too cold or too light or too dark and then change it and then do it again and since this is really just broad brush strokes work if i get it wrong here i can easily change it mistakes aren't all that high compared to when i'm doing the last bit of retouching and the highlights so to speak and while i know you would all love to hear me talk about reds and peaches and creams and brushwork and the paint that i use i've talked about that a lot i'll talk about it a little bit more but really i know what you all want to hear about and that's the signature and the situation surrounding it now whenever we find a painting with two signatures we obviously have a conundrum because they both cannot be correct one of them must be real and one of them must be not real but how to know which one is the authentic signature when you have no other supporting information no provenance no documentation well you may never know sometimes the signature will easily come off and you know right off the bat well this one is the fake because it is vulnerable and it is easily removed or it fluoresces under black light and so we know it was an addition but sometimes when the signatures are really really old as in this case well they both fluoresce the same and they're both aged and under microscopic examination they both kind of look the same so really it's a great mystery and in that case we can sometimes turn to the owner of the painting for a little bit more information so i reached out and i was able to contact the owner and learn a little bit about this painting's history now as far back as the owner can remember the painting has been in the family's collection from the beginning and the family lore is that it came directly from rosen now i mention that as family lore because there isn't a receipt there isn't a paper trail and nobody can confirm this information it's just been handed down throughout the generations as so much family history is and generally family history that is passed down from generation to generation is somewhat accurate but like a game of telephone it changes a little bit it morphs and the facts become fuzzy the tail becomes taller and so the owner of the painting confided that that is how they remember it or that is how the memory was passed to them but it very well could be different so no luck there now when i told the owner of this painting that there was a second signature that did not match the other signature that it threw into doubt the entire painting that we could no longer understand it as being by rosen there was conflicting information well i expected based on my past experience with situations like this that the owner would say thank you please package the painting and send it back i am done with conservation i would not like to do anything further because often that happens and in those cases i pack the painting up and i send it off and that's that i never see it again i don't know if it goes into a basement or if it goes in to the bin but in this case that's not how the client reacted the client reacted with astonishment with grace and even with a little bit of excitement and i of course was gobsmacked and confused because that is not what i expected but this client said that the painting was loved as an object that it affected within them something magical and that the artist was almost secondary it didn't really matter whether it was by rosen or whether it was by wilson it didn't change the fact that some visceral enjoyment was derived from looking at this painting and so in the client's perspective that there was some mystery something conflicting about this painting well that just made it more interesting instead of being purchased by the artist and owned by the family and then damaged and then restored poorly and then off to baumgartner for second conservation and then the subject of this video well now there's something conflicting about it who really is the artist and will we ever know it's a thread that could be pulled for ages and that to some degree makes it a more dynamic object as i said it doesn't fundamentally change the image the peaches haven't changed the grapes didn't change color it's not a better painting or a worse painting some could argue that maybe it is a more valuable or less valuable painting or more important or less important painting in the realm of art history but that's not why this painting is owned and loved by the owner so this signature surprisingly made this a more interesting piece for the owner which i have to say is probably the first time that that has happened but i am delighted in fact i was tickled pink when i heard this because it really speaks to the purity of the experience of looking at art i think too often when people look at art and museums they look at the placard on the side of the wall and they look at who the artist was they look at the age maybe they read the little blip that tells them about the painting and if it's an artist they recognize or know they wonder how much it's worth or how important it is but the exploration or the experience of being touched by the art by the image sometimes that can get lost and so to hear somebody that loves the painting for what the experience brings them almost wholly irrelevant of who created it i mean that's just that's art for art's sake and that's pretty much the most pure form of art appreciation so while i am still curious about who the artist is i'm not sure that i will ever know and after hearing from the client that it didn't matter to them well i'm perfectly content with that answer and so it doesn't really matter to me and to some degree that's kind of liberating because i don't have to make a hard decision about which signature to remove this is not solomon cutting the baby in half i can leave them both and leave the client with a fantastic story to tell about this painting with two signatures and so sometimes a really difficult situation has a really beautiful resolution it is rare but in this case it is a testament to the owners grace sophistication and truth to themselves and what they love about this painting and so as i've wrapped up retouching these peaches we take a look at them before well there's no beauty there nothing special but as it comes back together well i think we're onto something now when i started the retouching i mentioned that i had chosen a goldilocks sweet spot to start the peaches because i wanted something that i knew was going to be relatively easy and give myself a little bit of success early on put some wind in my sails not an early victory and mainly because i knew that i was going to have to work on this area an area that is just fundamentally missing i mean i know that there are strawberries here but that's about it and so looking at an area like this where the entirety of the image is missing one has to think about what approach one is going to take and when it comes to retouching conservators are an opinionated bunch ask three conservators and you will get five opinions there is no one right answer and that is something i try to stress often there is a spectrum of techniques and approaches that can be applied and it's up to the conservator to figure out what's going to work for the client for the painting and for themselves and to try to blend all of those into a recipe that will yield success now on one end of the spectrum there is the belief that no retouching should happen whatsoever that we are just conservators we are just here to preserve and that this painting has had a life and this is the scar of that life these are the battle wounds so to speak and they're important now that is an approach that generally seeks to treat the painting as an artifact and we have come to understand that paintings as fine art aren't really fully artifacts i mean they are in the sense that they are objects but they are not like a vas or a table or a decorative urn sometimes wear and patina age is not what we want on a painting in fact i have talked a lot about how patina is not something the paintings have so that on the far end of the spectrum i don't really see as appropriate at least not for this painting and this client there is then moving a little bit closer to the other end of the spectrum the idea that just toning the area is appropriate that just blending it in to one solid color and making it an amorphous blob so that the damage doesn't seem so dramatic would be enough effectively at this point but i don't think anybody would argue that that's okay and that that's something that could be easily overlooked it's still a pretty big sore spot right on the painting maybe if it were on the edge that would be appropriate but this is a central feature of the painting so again for this painting i don't think that that's going to work and then there are a bunch of other techniques called mimitec and tretegeo now mimitek retouching seeks to mimic or replicate what was there before the damage and it's complicated because i don't know what was here before the damage i don't have a photograph of this painting i don't know for sure what the artist put here yes i have some images of other paintings by the artist who maybe created this painting but i can't know for sure so while i talk about the conservator not making editorial decisions unfortunately retouching sometimes one has to i can take my cues about where the berries were located or what they look like from the actual painting and from other paintings but still i'm guessing i'm fairly certain that this is not exactly what it looked like when the artist created it and so to the end of mimitek retouching a technique was developed in the thirties by an italian conservator and it was called tretegeo and it in italian trattegio means hash marks or sketching and it's a technique whereby the image is recreated but with an asterisk that is from a distance the image will look as it should but as the viewer gets closer they'll start to see that the recreated berries are not made of smooth brush strokes blended in they're made of little dots or little hash lines sometimes on a diagonal sometimes vertically it is much like looking at a newspaper and seeing a photograph but as you get closer you can see the dots of the halftone and you can see that the image is actually composed of thousands or millions of little dots and so it allows the conservator to recreate the image while still telling the viewer that it is not the hand of the artist and this technique was developed because at the time there weren't archival and fully reversible paints and the few that were being developed were wholly imperfect and so much of the retouching was done in oil paint which has its own unique set of problems and so the conservators needed a way to differentiate their work from the original and hence the technique of trattegio was born now we have reversible paints we have paints that fluoresce under blacklight so viewers can easily see what we have added and easily remove what we have added now there are times when trattegio is appropriate and sometimes i do have clients inquire about it and i will show them examples and i will talk to them about what that actually means but by and large my clients don't want that they say it's interesting it's novel they say maybe if this were in a museum but this is going in my home this is an important piece of my life and i don't want to see the scars i want this to be put back as it should and yes i understand that the work that you are doing is maybe not 100 accurate to the original but the original is gone and lost and we can cry over that as much as we want or we can work to find a solution and so after having that discussion the overwhelming number of my clients private collectors galleries dealers auction houses corporations museums all choose mimitech retouching and so as i spend the next couple of minutes mimicking my way through this retouching i'm gonna go get a sip of water or maybe chill that bottle of wine and let you just enjoy this work [Music] well i hope you've enjoyed this work because as you can clearly see at times it is not terribly enjoyable working on the background was tedious boring and arduous and sometimes that's just the life of retouching i mean recreating berries is interesting putting brown paint on the background not so much but it is an essential part of the job and the painting would not be complete without it so you have to work your way through it luckily there is an end and when you finally reach it even though you may be cross-eyed or dizzy it is a great feeling now i decided for this painting i'm going to just spray on the varnish i'm not going to brush it on i'm just going to use the hvlp system and i'm going to do that because i want to build up the layer of varnish a little bit thicker than i normally would i know i talk about the varnish layer being really really thin and for most paintings that is exactly what you want but on this painting because there was a textural issue i want to build up the layer a little bit more to see if i can help compensate for some of those small deviations that i just wasn't able to remove or would be more visible if i just did a thin varnish so back and forth slowly letting the varnish tack up a little bit in between each pass i'm just going to start building up this layer and i also want to avoid that orange peel and once i've gotten a nice layer down i'm going to spray it from higher up and as the varnish is atomized the distance it has to go from the tip of the gun to the face of the painting it's going to start drying and turn into a crystal and it's going to stick to the surface of the painting and give a beautiful effect and so finally after all of that work after three bruising rounds we come to the final reveal i even wore a nice shirt and so here we have the painting as it came in it was a hot mess fundamentally altered and almost destroyed by the previous conservator but all hope was not lost though it was hard and at times painful it was successful and i think the results speak for themselves now there is a question of whether it was worth it to do all of this work well that's not for me to decide nor is it for you one could say that because this painting is not by the person whom everybody believed that it is not worth anything but that is just ridiculous because it is magical to the owner and i respect that and because of that i can forage through all of this hard work all of this frustration knowing that i'm going to return to my client something that is going to return that sense of wonder and joy into their lives and the before and after really do speak for themselves before i don't know it was bad but after well i think i beat the brawler and patreon stay tuned because i'm going to be answering all of your fantastic questions in a follow-up video and hopefully i'll have some surprises up my sleeve for you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 378,668

Rating: 4.9665151 out of 5

Keywords: 12-21-20

Id: WttRZtWClbE

Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ringaling11]

I like his videos just fine but I just wish he would go back to his old ways and make a narrated video and a video with just the background noise. I like falling asleep to the scraping sound and not the talking sound

[u/VonBrockmann]

Question because I'm a bit confused. I wonder why the area with the strawberries was red, if he removed the old overpaint? Shouldn't it have been white or the canvas color?