The Conservation of George Inness' "The Roman Campagna"

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] this video is going to feature the conservation of a painting by the American master George Inness that was painted in 1874 during his second trip to Italy this painting was owned by University and a museum and then my clients at some point perhaps in the 1940s the painting underwent a conservation whereby it was lined with an inter leaf to a new piece of canvas and aluminum after discussing this with my clients we decided that we were going to undo all of that old conservation work and return the painting to its original state and before I can do anything to the painting I need to face it and the facing is really important because it will protect the painting during the handling process and the removal of the lining I'm using a fish gelatin glue here because I need to make sure that whatever adhesive I use to bond the washi kozo paper to the surface of the painting is soluble in a different solvent than the one I will use to remove the wax lining for if it was soluble in the same solvent when I remove the wax lining the facing would come off too and it would have been all for naught so once the washi kozo is on the surface I will add more fish gelatin glue to make sure that that bond is really really strong once it's dry I can start to remove the excess paper and begin removing the painting from the stretcher now this painting was secured to the stretcher with tax which always makes me happy and removing them is pretty easy particularly given that when they penetrate through the wax they get coated and they become a little bit easier to pull out now removing the painting from the stretcher is easy but I have to be delicate because I don't want to cause any damage to the tacking edges and when I remove this stretcher I'm surprised to find that at some point probably the last conservator decided to staple it together on the inside and this renders it no longer able to provide tension and a fixed strainer now before I can start removing this old wax lining I need to do a little investigation I need to figure out what adhesive is being used and to understand the construction method of this interleafed lining I'll peel back a corner and try to take a sample of the adhesive and in this case it's just beeswax there's been no resins or other modifiers to it in addition there's a thin sheet of what appears to be muslin attached to the aluminum I'm going to take the painting back to my hot table which has been heating up over the past 20 or so minutes to about 135 degrees one of the nice things about working with wax even though it's messy and an imperfect material is that it's fairly easy to reverse with simple heat I'll put a piece of PE T film down on the aluminum of my hot table so that I don't make a mess and I'll allow the painting to rest on the heated up surface until the wax has started to become soft and soluble I'll just very slowly begin to lift up the painting from the wax I can use tools if necessary but I'm not putting a lot of stress or tension or force on the painting the nice thing about wax is that once it melts it has no adhesive properties and so the painting releases fairly easily one of the reasons I only used one layer of washi kozo is because of had I built up multiple layers or even face the painting with a piece of canvas it would have been too rigid and wouldn't have allowed me to flex the canvas and the painting and to pull the painting off of this lining now it's nice to work over the hot table when it's winter but during the summer spending an hour or so on top of a hundred and thirty-five degree piece of aluminum isn't so much fun but there's no easy way to do this and there's no way to rush it as you can see it's a very slow process and where necessary I will use the tools to remove the canvas from the lining because I want to make sure that nothing is lost and I'll continue to work slowly just allowing the wax to release and pulling off this canvas from the lining and as you can see it doesn't take much effort to release the painting that weight in the front is there just to keep everything in place so that it doesn't slide or lift off the table while I'm working and so you can see the painting comes off pretty easily now I want to make sure that any pieces of the original tacking edge that had been lost or separated are maintained so that I can use them later when I put the painting back together now I'm just going to disassemble this construction so that you can see that's the muslin that's the aluminum sheet and then that's the lining canvas and this is a really thick piece of aluminum it's almost an eighth of an inch thick which is kind of overkill but it is what it is I'm gonna throw that all away because I don't need it so with the painting removed I can put it back down on the hot table lower the heat just a little bit and allow the wax to melt once that wax melts it's fairly straightforward to remove I can use a little bit of solvent to encourage it to thin it out and then I'll just use some wadded up cotton balls to lift off that wax from the surface that's not difficult I'm not using a lot of force I'm just lifting off that wax and trying to allow the cotton balls to absorb it so that there's less wax on the painting but this is just the first step in removing the wax because a lot of that wax has penetrated into the canvas and so I have to desaturate that canvas and that's done by placing the painting on an absorbent cotton blotter paper wrapping it in a layer of PE t film keeping the heat on the table and using the vacuum pump on my hot table to suck out all of the air and create downward pressure now the combination of the heat and the pressure and the absorbent blotter paper will suck out all of that excess wax from the painting into the paper and sometimes this procedure has to be done multiple times depending on how much wax was used luckily in this case I only needed to do it once because it was fairly thin with all the wax removed I can now take that washi kozo off of the painting the nice thing about using washi kozo is that distilled water will soften up the paper and the adhesive making it fairly easy to remove I can peel it back slowly ensuring that nothing has stuck to the painting and that no paint is coming with unfortunately though because the water makes the paper soft and kind of dissolves it it's a little bit more difficult to remove than if it were a chemical adhesive that didn't degrade the paper sometimes I will have to use various tools to lift off the paper from the surface of the painting but it is a testament to how well the fish gelatin has worked and to the correct ratio that I mixed a fish gelatin to water to see that this bond has been really strong and really successful it lets me know that it was providing adequate support and protection for the painting and it's always nice to know that the work you're doing has been successful hey enjoy the video so far yeah I knew you would there's something really satisfying about watching a dumpster fire get fixed up into something really beautiful I get it I fix things all day long but you know there are some things I can't fix like you're busted website nope no way luckily that's where Squarespace comes in with a few clicks you can turn your hot mess of a website into a beautiful masterpiece that works everywhere and Squarespace gets artists if you don't already have a Flickr Twitter Instagram or Foursquare full of images to import they have a library of like 50 million that you can use edit online and be sure we'll scale and display properly everywhere so go to Squarespace comm for your free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner for 10% off your first website or domain and say thank you they made this video happen and so with all of the facing removed I can start the process of clean painting now since its 1940s conservation this painting has been kept in pretty good condition it's been in a museum it's been in a university and then several private collections so it hasn't been subjected to a lot of the agents of change that can create problems for paintings environmental degradation pests smoke nicotine handling there are a ton of them that can have adverse impacts on paintings so it's not terribly dirty but I still need to remove whatever is on the surface of the painting because it's no longer doing the job that it once did it has changed and it's not appropriate for this stuff to be here anymore now during the process of removing the old varnish you can see that some of the areas of retouching have been revealed the old retouching paint has come off I'll have to address those later and so I was interesting to see what you find when you remove a varnish now this piece wasn't terribly dirty you can see the difference in Sheen from where I have removed the varnish to where I haven't but interestingly enough as I got into this painting more I discovered that there was a lot of old varnish still on the painting and those are those blotchy areas to the left now why that farness she's still there is is anyone's guess it could be that the conservator missed those spots was taking a very cautious approach or thought they had the painting fully cleaned nonetheless all of those areas need to be removed the old varnish now georgeanna's was known for using a lot of glazes in his paintings and because of that I'm not going to take the approach of using solvents to remove this old varnish it would be easy to take a very aggressive stall that solvent and try to break down this old varnish but it also might run the risk of damaging any glazes that he applied to the sky instead I'm taking a mechanical approach and I'm using a dental tool to scrape off this layer of old varnish now I'm not using a lot of pressure here I'm really just letting the weight of the tool glide across the surface and to break up that layer of old varnish it doesn't require a lot of muscle and it doesn't require a lot of effort but it does require pay and attention to detail because I don't want to do any damage to the painting but I also want to get as much if not all of this old varnish off of the surface and out of the impasto of the painting so all of those little dark spots and the nooks and crannies of the paint texture have to be removed and so I'll just work slowly I'll take breaks if I need I can switch tools if I need the thing that I want to make sure of is that I'm getting the varnish off without damaging the paint layer now luckily for me there was a relatively small amount of old varnish that needed to be removed if this had been a 5 foot by 10 foot painting and the whole thing would have been covered in varnish that needed to be removed by a dental tool it would have been a very different equation but in this case it was relatively small now with the painting mostly cleaned I need to address the areas of old retouching that I couldn't get off with mild solvent these are areas of old oil paint that have fully oxidized and can't be removed with basic solvents so I have to use a very aggressive gelled solvent to break down this oil paint and this is one of the reasons we don't use oil paint to do retouching anymore it's because once it oxidizes it basically becomes permanent and it darkens and changes color over time and so what once looked good and looked like a good idea will at some point not look correct and need to be removed now at this point with the painting fully cleaned the surface grime the old varnish the old old varnish and the retouching removed I could start the structural work now this painting came in it was lined to a piece of canvas with an aluminum interleaf but I don't see any reason for that there's no tears there are no holes there's no catastrophic damage of the painting so to put a new lining on would be unnecessary excessive and totally inappropriate what I will do however is a strip lining whereby I use a heat-activated reversible film adhesive and a piece of Belgian linen to add new material to the tacking edge where the tacking edge has been compromised or lost and this is an approach I really like because he gives me the most bang for my buck that is I get all the structural reinforcement where the canvas needs it yet I preserve as much of the original canvas as possible and one thing that I noticed when working on this painting is that the canvas had two vertical creases and marks from a vertical crossbar on the original stretcher and if we remember the stretcher it came in on had no vertical cross bars which tells me that the stretcher came in on is a replacement and not original to the painting and that may seem like inside baseball but to historians and conservators and some collectors that's really important information and I want to do my part to make sure that that part of the paintings history lives on so at this point I can turn my attention to the stretcher bar that we talked about you can see there's a pretty big bow in the stretcher right where that knot was and that deformation is going to be a big problem when I go to stretch the painting back on to the support if I don't take corrective action that bow is gonna create a divot or a dimple that no matter how tight I stretch the painting or how much tension I add with the keys will always be there and so I have to correct it and the first thing I need to do is disassemble this stretcher and get rid of those staples get rid of those old keys and break it down into its four components I'm going to also remove all of the old tacks and nails that are still embedded in the stretcher because those are gonna be problematic for the next couple steps and I need to make sure that there aren't any of these things in the way now I could rip this down and just make it smaller but then the painting would have to become smaller and that's not appropriate so what I'm gonna do is take a piece of pine that I've ripped and I'm gonna fill in that gap so that we have a new edge I'm gonna be using wood glue I'm not gonna using any mechanical fasteners because the glue bond will be plenty strong and I'm going to be using a very technologically advanced method of spreading this glue because I want to make sure that the entire surface has good purchase so I'll put the new pine on to the original and I will use clamps to hold it in place while the glue dries now at this point it's not accurately fit there's too much wood and it doesn't match the profile but I'll take care of all of that later first things first I just need to make sure that that wood bonds to the original stretcher I'll remove some of the excess glue I'll clamp it up and then through the magic of editing it's all dry and I can take it out of the clamps now at this point there's too much wood and it's not properly shaped so I have to address that so I'm going to take a ruler and I'm gonna go from edge to edge high point to high point I'm gonna make a line and that's gonna be the material that needs to be removed I'm gonna use a jig that I made and my table saw to rip down all of that excess wood and you'll see as I start at the edge the table saw is going to remove almost all of the material leaving a very very slim piece of new pine attached that stretcher you can see it but as I move down towards the bow the table saw is going to be removing less material and more wood is going to be adhered to the original support filling in that gap and the table saw is a great tool here because it's gonna give me a very clean very precise new edge that's gonna work really well when I go to stretch the painting and so I'll remove it from my jig and I'll take a look at that cut and you can see it's a really clean cut really nice sharp blade and when I place it down on the table you can see that that edge is now completely flat but we're not done yet that piece of wood doesn't match the bevel on the original stretcher so I have to use a hand plane and just slowly remove off wood until that bevel is match it's slow-going until it's not and then with sped up video you can see just how efficient I can work so that edge is now okay but the underside isn't there's no lip and one of the things that a stretcher needs is a lip to remove the canvas from the wood because if that canvas is touching the wood you can get a stretcher bar mark and so I'll rip down a new piece of wood and I'll build up this stretcher and all of the other pieces so that there's an adequate lip that will keep the canvas from touching that wood and once all those pieces have been modified I can put the stretcher back together and we can see how effective it's going to be at holding that canvas off of that wood you can see how the bow has been corrected and we have a nice square stretcher support I'm gonna be using some nails to hold the stretchers square because I don't want it to deform as I'm stretching the painting would be a real big bummer to do all this work only to stretch the painting all wonky now I'm gonna be using steel tacks to stretch this painting because that's what I prefer and you guys know that I'm gonna start by putting a couple attacks in the center of each edge of the canvas and I'm gonna do this so that I can get adequate tension in the center of the canvas and then I will move towards the edges and begin tacking the canvas down to the stretcher and I do this because if I were to start at one corner and just work across all four corners I might trap in a wrinkle or a ripple or a bulge that would be almost impossible to remove and then I have to take the canvas off and start over again which is really a big bummer so by working from the center out I can ensure that there's even tension and no excess canvas I'm gonna remove the excess strip lining and I'm going to tidy up the edges some conservators like to glue this down to the stretcher I don't because I think that's terrible idea it's messy and it makes it harder to remove later so I'll just use tacks to secure this excess folded canvas down and I like to make sure that the back of the canvas looks as good as the front and so I like to tidy up these corners nobody ever sees this stuff for me but you know my labels right there and my name is there and so I want to make sure that everything is nice and tidy and that I'm proud with the quality of work that leaves my studio now because this is a loose canvas and not lying to an inch or leaf anymore we're gonna use keys to expand that stretcher you can see as I cap in the stretcher it gets bigger and that takes up any excess material in the canvas it adds tension and keeps it tight these are new keys that I cut and I'm going to secure them to the stretcher using a piece of fishing line and attack so that they don't get lost and they don't fall down in between the canvas and the stretcher create a bulge now this painting didn't have much catastrophic loss there were no major tears or holes or water damage or really major losses of any kind but there were some small areas where the paint had chipped off over time and before I can do any retouching on these areas I need to make sure that I fill them in and this is important because even if my color matching is spot-on if I don't fill it in when viewed from a raking light or the side you would see all of the divots and it would look terrible so I'm going to fill in those areas where the paint has been lost I'm not worried about over filling right now because I'll go ahead and remove that excess with a swab and some distilled water this is also really important because I want to make sure that the only areas where the fill in medium remains our areas where there have been losses I don't want to cover up any of the original paint so I'll use these swabs and I will remove all of that excess you can see it comes off pretty easily so it's not terrible difficult now luckily in this case these losses are really small and the painting is really smooth so I don't have to sculpt or add texture to this filling medium but if there was a lot of impasto that is the physical texture of paint I would because again viewed from a raking light the color may be right but the texture would be wrong and you'd be able to see all of that retouching I'm going to apply a synthetic resin isolation layer of varnish and this is important for a couple of reasons one it will help simulate what the painting will look like with final varnish that is the colors will get more intense and that allow me to do my retouching to the accurate colors not a washed out version so the my retouching will match and - it separates my work from the original painting and you may ask why didn't I put the isolation layer on before the fill in medium well a couple of reasons this varnish if I applied it directly to that painting without the fill-in would saturate those areas of raw canvas and be almost impossible to remove and to the fill and medium just doesn't stick very well to the varnish and I don't want that villain medium to pop off at some point in the future and now the retouching process can begin because the quality of light changes during the day and during different seasons I'm using adjustable stand lights so that I can calibrate the light that I'm using I've found that using between forty eight hundred and fifty one hundred Kelvin is the best light for retouching forty eight hundred is a little bit warmer than 50 100 whereas 2500 is incandescent and very yellow and six thousand is very blue 48 to 50 100 gives me a nice approximation of daylight and since the Sun has been around for as long as I've been alive and will be around for longer than I'm alive it's a pretty good mark to retouch against now there's a big misconception about retouching that you have to be a good painter or that good painters make a good retouchers and that's actually completely the opposite retouching is not painting and it is not about liberally applying color and medium and paint to a surface in fact retouching is the exact opposite it's about using a brush to apply a paint very conservatively only where it's required and so you can see I'm using my brush not in a painterly method but more as a tool to apply little dots of paint just where the paint is missing so only these white areas will receive new paint it's inappropriate for me to apply paint where there's already paint I'm only here to make sure that the damage disappears to the naked eye so that the viewer can appreciate the painting as a whole and not see all of this damage and with areas that are small like this and not necessarily heavily consequential this isn't the face or a hand or a very exciting thing to retouch it's really easy to lose your focus and to phone it in or to allow the brush to take over and to be less conservative than you need to be so taking breaks and stepping away from the work is really important so I'll take some breaks and break up this retouching process into several sessions even though there are only small areas to retouch because I want to make sure that I'm really focused and this altogether probably took maybe an hour and a half or so obviously speeding up the video helps it seem like I'm working very fast and fluidly but I did take my time partially because this is a really important painting it's going to be photographed for the catalog resume but also my clients trust me and they want the best quality of work and I need to make sure that I set myself up to deliver that and so working slowly taking breaks making sure that I'm intellectually and emotionally engaged is one way that I can ensure that I'm delivering the best possible product to Michael and now I'm using a paint made by the my merry company which is an oil free archival fully reversible paint and it's important because I want to make sure that my work can be undone in the future and so for an area like this this tiny little scratch I'm just painting in that scratch I'm not adding pigment or paint around the scratch and to some degree I'm not even really trying to make it completely disappear what I am trying to do is disguise it camouflage it make it so that the naked eye doesn't see the damage because if you don't see the damage then the damage doesn't really exist does it and once I've completed the retouching I'm going to take the painting and I'm going to go look at it under black light and sometimes I'll do this during the retouching process as well and it's helpful because the black light will reveal all of the work that I've done that is all of the paint that I have added will show up under UV light and is important because it keeps the conservator honest and it shows the quality of restoration work that's been done so while you can't see it with the naked eye under visible light when I turn off the visible light and turn on the UV you could start to see all of these little dots of dark purple and those are areas where I've added paint the paint I use is specially designed to fluoresce so that you can see it under UV and this is indicative of good retouching lots of little dots lots of little hits of paint not big brush strokes not glazing not painterly work just where there's been losses and so this is how you can check your work and make sure that you've done a good job for your client and with retouching complete I can apply the final layer of varnish I'm gonna spray it on because it'll give me more control over the sheen and because I don't want to disturb the isolation layer or the retouching so with the work done on the painting I can turn my attention to the frame this frame is original to the work and at some point probably in the 40s it was glazed over with brown gray oil paint and unfortunately there's no easy way to remove oil paint I have to use a pretty aggressive gelled solvent and I have to work slowly and carefully but it's totally worth it because what lies beneath all of this brown gray glazing is the original gold paint and original gilding now in this frame the edges and the sides were painted with gold paint whereas the front and all the ornamentation was gilded with real gold now this isn't necessarily common but it's not terribly uncommon either because it allows the frame maker to make a really gorgeous frame while keeping the cost much much more controllable for the client now I'm going to apply this chemical and I'm gonna use various tools to remove the chemical and the paint when it's ready I'll use a stiff bristle brush as I'm doing here to get into the nooks and the crannies and then I'll switch to an old toothbrush and you may say that's crazy to use a toothbrush but I would ask you over decades millions and millions of dollars have been spent to devise a device that will gently and safely remove grime from the nooks and crannies of a delicate object and so why would I reinvent the wheel when the toothbrush is the perfect tool I'll work slowly in controlled areas because this chemical is indiscriminate it doesn't stop just because I want it to stop and so if I leave it on too long it will not only remove the glazing but it will also remove the gilding and the bowl and the gesso it will go right down to the raw wood so by working in small areas I can keep control now this frame had multiple different applications of gold some of it was painted some of it was leaf and some of it was leafed and then burnished this area of fluting was leaf tanned and burnished and the burnishing makes the gold extreme right whereas the other areas that were just left are a little bit more satin and so removing this glazing from the fluted area reveals just how bright and glorious this gold leafing was and it's really exciting for me to be able to take all of this old oil paint off and to reveal what the frame did look like and should look like now my clients didn't want this frame brand-new and perfect if they did they probably would have had me strip it all the way down and rebuild it or they would have bought a new frame but I'm working slowly to remove as much of the glazing as possible and to reveal as much of the original gold as I can I have to work slowly and carefully I have to use a full-face respirator and protective equipment but it's well worth the effort now this frame had several losses of the original composition ornamentation and to recreate it I'm going to be using silicone to create a mold I'll start off by using plasticine clay to create a dam so the silicone doesn't go everywhere and then I'll mix my silicone up and one-to-one ratio using a scale and when ready I will apply it directly to the frame and the great thing about silicone is that it captures great detail it doesn't stick to anything so it's not gonna lift off all the leafing or the the paint and it lasts forever so I'm gonna have this mold for as long as I need it and I can reuse it as many times as I want so the silicone doesn't stick the plasticine is actually more of a problem than silicone but once I get it fully off and remove the plasticine from the silicone you'll start to see just how accurate it is and just how easy it's going to be to recreate the lost ornamentation now because this ornamentation was really small I'm just using plaster of Paris and water to recreate it if it were a large ornament or something that was very pronounced I might use PVA or some fibers fiberglass or other fibers mixed in to give it more support but with small things like this it's not really necessary there's diminishing returns for that amount of work so once the plaster of Paris has been allowed to dry and hardened I will remove it from the mold and while the hardest part is removing the tape and the enclosure once I get this out and I remove the silicone you can see just how easily it comes off and when I do fully remove it you can see just how accurate of a piece this is so now I can just start to trim it down and modify it shape it so that it fits the frame and there's nothing fancy about this it's cutting it down sanding it down shaping it using any tools using all the tools that you have at your disposal to get it to a place where it's going to accurately match what was there once before and so once I have it to a state where I'm satisfied I can glue the piece down and make sure that it doesn't chip off and even though these are small areas simply replacing them with appropriate castings makes a big difference in allowing you to see the hole and not just the damage and my clients really do appreciate this and I really enjoy it too now there were some areas of this frame where the original gilding was just really damaged and I could strip down all of the gold all of the Bowl all of the gesso and then regester rebola and water gilded so that I could get a beautiful surface but I'm not intending on burnishing any of this area so I don't need to use water gilding I can use an oil sighs now I'm going to use 22 karat gold and it's incredibly delicate and you'll see that I tear it just by lifting it off too quickly when you use a Gilders knife to cut it down into smaller more manageable pieces because I don't want to waste any of this stuff and I want to be able to get it into the nooks and crannies pretty accurately using a statically charged Gilders brush I can pick up the leaf and apply it down to the tacky size and I really enjoy leafing I'm not terribly great at it I'm learning but everything I see I want to put gold leaf on now it's incredibly fun and incredibly exciting to do so once it's all been applied and it's let's sit for a day or so I can start to remove the excess gold with a soft animal hair brush and I'll save all of that gold because it can be used again for another gilding project and because it's gold and it's expensive but by using a soft brush I can also tamp down and make sure that the gold that I've applied is smooth and again because I'm not burnishing this I don't need a super smooth super hard surface but one thing I will have to do once I get all the gold well bonded and all of the excess gold off is I'll have to tone and tint and work the gold so that it matches the original you can see that the gold that I use is a little bit more yellow than the gold wood that was originally used so I'm gonna have to work to make sure that those match or at least that they don't look disparate I'm gonna do that by using ultra blonde shellac and aniline dye and so I'm going to add the dye to the shellac and mix it up to a color that I think is gonna help bridge that difference in this case it's kind of an orange II red so I will apply the shellac with a brush to the areas of new gold and you can see almost instantly it starts to take on the look of the original and now I'm not trying to make a perfect frame here but what I am trying to do is make sure that the areas of damage don't appear so damaged that they fit in with the age of the frame they don't look new but they don't look like a hot mess and so tinting and working this gold is completely appropriate and helps me achieve that effect I'll use a little rotten stone which is basically dust to give it a little bit of age now there were several labels on the back of this frame and several labels that had been lost and that's one thing that we want to make sure it doesn't happen in the future we don't want any of these labels to ever get lost now if this frame is ever damaged or replaced we want to make sure that these labels which are really important to the provenance of the artwork stay with the artwork so I'm going to remove these labels from the frame luckily they were applied with just a water-based glue so I can use to soften up that adhesive and peel up those labels they're incredibly delicate and fragile but once I get them off I can press them allow them to dry and then I can mount them to an acid-free piece of eight ply museum board and I can wrap that in mylar and then adhere that to the back of the stretcher where it will stay with the painting forever and now my work on the painting and the frame are almost complete all that's left to do is put the two together so the painting goes back into the frame and the labels that we mounted to an eight ply acid-free board are mounted to the back of the stretcher using brass screws and this ensures that no matter where the painting goes this provenance stays with it I'll also add a acid free foam core backing and this helps protect the back of the painting and also create an air chamber so that the flecks on the canvas is minimal which could cause cracking or undue trauma on the painting I'm going to use the original mounting hardware because it worked and there's no reason to replace it if it's not broken I'll use the brass screws and the original holes so that I don't do any more damage to the frame now the original placard had the wrong title of the painting so while my clients didn't want it on the face I'm saving it keep on the back because once it's gone it's gone and there's no reason for that and so now my work is complete the frame has been cleaned off of that grey brown glazing the damage has been repaired the paintings been cleaned the old inappropriate interleaf lining has been removed it's a stable and sound as it has ever been and this was a really fun project not only because of the scope of the work but because georgian is is an american master who i studied when i was in art school and to play some small role in helping him ensure that his vision his artwork sustains is really what it's all about and so you can see the before the frame is drab and kind of ugly and the painting is flat and lifeless but fully conserved it's a glorious painting and you can see just why Ennis was such a master you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 848,409

Rating: 4.9674029 out of 5

Keywords: Art, fine art, art conservation, fine art conservation, art restoration, fine art restoration, painting, painting conservation, painting restoration, oil painting, restoration, conservation, ASMR, Chicago, craft, oddly satisfying

Id: Kznj1NZN90A

Length: 39min 44sec (2384 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/fabidoux]

So I've just watched a 40 minutes video instead of what I what I was supposed to be doing. Have my upvote.

[u/69andahafl]

It's always interesting to hear his criticisms of the past conservators (if somewhat one-sided). This one was certainly less scathing as some of the time, but really shows how far the art of conservation has come since the last attempt on this painting, especially with the oil paints.

Really makes you wonder in another 100 years if they'll be looking back at these same techniques and wondering why they decided to do it one way in particular.

[u/ausieborn]

The videos on this channel are such a high level of quality it's probably the first time I have ever been completely okay with squarespace in-video advertising. He's such a professional I could watch these restorations all day.

[u/CabooseMSG]

On a related note, anyone know where to get a repro or print of this? I cant seem to find one anywhere, but this is absolutely stunning

[u/SmittyHog216]

I’m not a huge “art” person...however, I have a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for restoration techniques in almost any medium and truly enjoy the tedious nature of the minutiae of this type of project. I also genuinely appreciate enjoying the original product as it was meant to be seen while respecting the patina acquired over time. Thanks so much for sharing this.

[u/Castim]

I thought that the steps involved in such restoration, several people would be involved (e.g., painting, damaged parts of the frame, gilding...).

I am quite impressed by the wide range of skills, it looks like a challenging but interesting work.

Is it common that a single person handles such task?