The Salvage Job - Part 2

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] while part one of this series was focused on removal and undoing removal of the surface crime removal of the old varnish of the old retouching of the old fill-in of the other retouching of the other fill-in of the other overpainting of the linings plural part two is focused squarely on putting things back together a new interleaved lining new fill in new retouching new varnish and it all begins here with the belgian linen canvas that gets marked to fit and cut to size the interleaf for this lining will negate any movement that the belgian linen is want to do with humidity changes so with the painting all sandwiched together it can go onto the large hot table the air extraction tubes can be set into place the heat turned on set to temperature and then the vacuum pump can be turned on and the air extraction can begin providing even distributed pressure on the whole painting this video largely glosses over all of the materials preparation because let's be honest watching me cut canvas glue and film isn't all that exciting i mean it's not even that exciting for me to do that work but spending time and energy on the preparation of the materials all of the structural behind-the-scenes stuff is absolutely critical to ensuring that the final outcome what we see is just so you know it's kind of like when you're building your website and you don't want to code css javascript or html you just want squarespace to do it for you squarespace's platform uses the latest and greatest web technologies their templates are mobile friendly and work on any device anywhere and their library of plugins everything from online image galleries to contact forms online scheduling and even e-commerce solutions are as simple as point-and-click you don't have to spend any of your precious time learning how to code or figuring out how to make the whole website work squarespace takes care of everything for you so that you can focus on your website your passion your business and one of the coolest things is how modular the whole platform is if you want to change your template click it's done if you want to add a marketplace click that's done too if you want to move your gallery around change anything click it's done squarespace has made it so simple there really isn't any good reason not to go with them 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 u plus square space plus the interwebs equals world domination cool back to the painting i left the stretcher as is because it really wasn't important to focus on right away but now i do have to start preparing it to receive the painting there are so many rounds of tacks and nails in this support that i questioned whether or not it was even worth saving ultimately however it is worth saving it's a pretty good support and unless there was something catastrophically wrong with it i wouldn't throw it away now it is missing several keys so i'm going to go over to my shop and i'm going to start preparing some new ones by tracing out one of the original ones i can ensure that they're going to be identical and that will fit properly doing this way i have learned my lesson and bundled up this stack of keys with some painters tape just to make sure that they aren't sliding around and i am being careful with my fingers i do like them and need them but using a sharp bandsaw blade is the best way to ensure that i get a clean nice cut and with one cut there we go keys i'll sand them up just to make them look a little bit nicer but also so that they slide in the mortises a little bit better rough wood seems to bind while i was dealing with the stretcher the painting was allowed to cool and now that it is room temperature i can turn off the vacuum pump remove it from the sleeve and bring it over to my large table where i will start to fill in all of the voids and voids there are lots of them so i'm using a fairly large palette knife here and i'm not being all that delicate i'm just going to try to cover up all of the areas as much as i can i can always remove what i apply now so there really isn't any benefit to trying to be really reserved i need to make sure that all of the areas of loss are filled in and smoothed out because i don't want any waves bubbles wrinkles divots or other planar distortions to catch the light once i've applied a varnish i'll make multiple passes of thin filling material one after the other until i have built up enough of the material that i'm confident the divots are all filled and then after it has had some time to dry a day or two i can begin removing the excess there are many ways to remove the excess fill-in material and i can start by using a cotton swab dipped in water and slowly working around the excess fill-in material it is water-based so it receives that water swells and dissolves the swab can then remove the excess and i can check it with my fingers it is important that i remove all of the excess material i don't want to simply cover up and smooth out or feather any of the existing paint now on this large area i'm going to be using some very fine sandpaper i know it seems really weird to use sandpaper on a painting but you can see that i'm not actually sanding the paint just the large area of fill-in once all of the excess is removed i can take a little bit of water on a shop towel and just clean up the surface of the painting removing any of the dust and any of the residues i'll make several passes to ensure that i've got all of this up as it can contaminate the varnish the retouching or the isolation resin that i'm going to be applying later on with the painting largely cleaned i'm not so concerned that it's 100 clean yet i'm still going to be handling it and i'll go over it once or twice more before i apply the isolation layer i can transfer it over to the stretcher and begin fitting it onto the support now this is a replacement stretcher the original is long gone and while it fits approximately it's not precise there's a little bit of a gap say a quarter of an inch around the entire painting so i'll center the painting on the stretcher and then hope that when the painting is ultimately framed the framer will create a rabbet that is large enough to cover that gap as usual i start my retouching in the center of each side but this is mostly out of force of habit because this painting has an interleave so unlike another painting without an interleaved lining this canvas is immobilized against any movement any distortions when the humidity changes this canvas won't get slack in addition no matter how hard i pull on this canvas it's not going to get any more taut so i don't have to worry about any distortions in the center or on the edges so starting in the middle and working my way to the edges is mostly just because i've been doing it that way forever and i'm too old to learn any new tricks i'll continue stretching with the painting on the floor resting on some foam pads to protect it from the concrete again i'll work from the center out just making sure that the tacks are evenly placed and all the way into the canvas it's riveting work and once i'm done i will flip the painting on its face and then start trimming up the excess canvas from the lining there's really no critical need to save any of this canvas but i like to keep some of it so that i can fold it back on itself and then use tax to secure it in place i think it looks nice and it's a sign of craftsmanship that i think my clients appreciate so using very small tax and folding the canvas in i'll go ahead on the back and just secure it into place these tacks don't provide any real structural stability or any benefit to the stretching itself they're just here to keep the canvas in place and to make everything look nice and tidy after years and years of doing this there is actually one side of my magnetic steel tacking hammer that has been ground down to a rounded edge from a square one just from running it along the back of the canvas it's pretty amazing actually when you think about it and now with all of the stretching work done and all of the canvas tidied up i can take these beautiful new keys that i have made and insert them into the stretcher now on a normal painting that isn't lined with an interleave these keys are absolutely critical to adding tension to the canvas but here because we have an interleave that's not really necessary the function of the keys is mostly to keep the stretcher together these joints that were made by the stretcher maker aren't exactly precise there's a little bit of play and the keys help compensate for that play and help keep the stretcher square and from getting all wonky once the keys are installed i'll take a little bit of fishing line and another tack and i'll secure them into place i do this because i don't want these keys to fall out i'm not concerned that they're really going to get lost they can always be replaced i'm mostly concerned that they're going to fall in between the stretcher and the canvas and create a bulge or a dent over time and now i can do a final wipe down of this canvas to get rid of all the residues before the next step which actually isn't applying an isolation layer or doing any retouching i'm heading over to the easel because i want to do something before i do retouching there is so much loss here and the fill-in medium is so bright white that my concern is that any areas that i don't hit perfectly are going to shine through as white or just too bright and since much of the painting has an abraded look particularly in the coat and the background i need to set up a situation whereby i can mimic that look so i'm creating a palette with some gouache and i'm going to simply tone and tint all of the areas of fill in and i'm going to do this with a color that tries to mimic what is on the canvas already this kind of iron oxide burnt umber black gray purplish this color and i'm doing this because i want to make sure that any areas that i don't cover with the retouching paint aren't bright white but also because the bright white of the villain medium is a little distracting here and it's hard to see through the forest if that makes any sense it's hard to see what i am going to retouch with all of this bright white here it also changes the aperture of my eye so to speak a lot of bright white causes me to see colors a little differently so by toning and tinting some of this retouching particularly on a dark painting it's going to help me see past this fill-in material a little bit better so i'm going to work my way through moderating the color a little bit because it's not a uniform color on the entire painting there are areas that are more blue areas that are more pink areas that are a little bit more gray and particularly on this area i need to make sure that i've got all of the white gone so that when i do add my retouching paint i can be a little bit looser and not have to worry about this fill and medium shining through and so with all of this completed now i am ready to apply the isolation layer the resin that i'm applying is going to serve two purposes and you've heard me talk about this before one is to simulate what the colors are going to look like when the varnish is applied but also to compensate for any undulations very tiny ones that are in this canvas this painting has been worked over many times and so the surface is not perfectly smooth and this resin will sit in all of those tiny little craters and even them out so that i do have a more unified surface this doesn't necessarily help the retouching but it helps when i apply the final varnish so that i don't see all of those little divots or uneven areas that i otherwise would this is an ultraviolet stable synthetic resin and so it does double duty to protect the painting not only from the physical world but from uv light the final varnish also does that so i guess you could say this painting has double protection and now on to retouching and there is a lot of retouching on this painting and anytime i start a painting with a lot of retouching i like to choose some low-hanging fruit first give myself something that i know i can achieve fairly easily so i feel good about this experience if i started off with an incredibly difficult area and it didn't go smoothly well it's just going to make the rest of the painting feel that much more impossible so by notching an easy win it allows me to trick myself into thinking that the rest of the painting is going to be as cooperative and so i started with the hand it gives me an idea for what the flesh tones are going to look like and for how the paint is going to react on the canvas there are lots of little abrasions here and unlike the last retouching which just saw fit to glaze them all in with one fell swoop of a large brush here i'm just adding little dots now as you notice i applied these dots they actually lighten up once the paint dries when the varnish is applied they'll darken up so if they look a little light now that just means that they're going to look right when the varnish is applied now with the easy stuff done there is nothing left but the hard stuff the face and the first thing that i need to do here is well just kind of tone it to match get the skin color right kind of do some general color blocking so that again i can start to see the face and not just the areas of retouching that need to be applied this is fairly easy and it's relatively mindless it's just a matter of mixing color and letting the contours of the face that exists guide me it still is important that i am very reserved here because i don't want to add paint where there is paint i just want to add color where the color has been lost it is in this step that i can start to build out what i think the face is going to look like where the bones are the structure of the sitter's face is of course there's a lot of refinement that needs to be done but this is the natural first step broad brush strokes now in some of my early conversations with the client about how to treat this painting's conservation and retouching we spoke about leaving much of the coat as is not trying to recreate it but the client did have the desire to see the face put back together to see it rebuilt and so i agreed at least to try to put the face back together to try to recreate what i thought this person might have looked like i always have trepidation about doing this because there is so much editorial process whenever a conservator tries to fill in the blanks of a missing area and on a landscape or a still life with fruit perhaps it's a little bit less consequential because we know what fruit looks like we know what a landscape looks like and we are forgiving but on a face it's really difficult and here i have nothing to work from i have looked at the original by van dyke and this painting does not look like the original so i cannot use the original as a template because well that would be recreating something that perhaps wasn't here and so as i start to fill in the gaps this is the easy part making the cheeks and the chin making all of that go away making the forehead unified this is the easy stuff the hard stuff comes with the nose the eyes and the lips particularly the eyes because i mean there's almost nothing there the bottom half of both eyes is missing and i have to figure out what to do because right now well he looks like he's wearing a mask and i don't think anybody would be satisfied if i called it quits here now i mentioned my trepidation about retouching these eyes and what you're about to see is a prime example of what i do not want to have happen when i start retouching i got carried away here i started working on these eyes and started letting my instinct to make them better get a hold of me i started to see the eyes and started to work to recreate them to give them a shape to add folds and shadows where there weren't to add highlights i started to paint and i wasn't aware that i was doing this because of course i couldn't see the forest for the trees i was trapped in the moment i was listening to some great music and the retouching was going beautifully and to some degree the eyes were coming along really nicely unfortunately when i took a step back i realized my mistake and i wrestled with it because on one hand the painting looked much better it looked much more complete the face was unified his nose his mouth his eyes it looked like a full painting but it was not the painting that arrived at my studio so it had to go all of it hours upon hours of retouching just like that i had to remove it and while it may seem like this would pain me it was actually quite liberating taking the onus of narrative for retouching off of the conservator's plate is absolutely critical leaving it to just technical recreation is where we like to live and what i had done before was a bridge too far and so removing it was the only thing that was acceptable and whatever feelings i had about wasted time or wasted energy i have to swallow those in fact i have to ignore those because i should never have those in the first place so with a clean palate and a more acute sense of what i actually needed to do i began retouching for the second time and here i was committed to only retouching what was missing the majority of the face went along just as it did the first time just retouching the dots removing the small areas of damage really keeping my brush controlled and restrained this wasn't all that difficult i did it once i could do it again and mixing skin tones is really a pleasure it's fun to see the different shades of greens and blacks and yellows and pinks and reds that compose a face but of course all this while i was thinking about the elephant in the room thinking about how i was going to address that nose and those eyes and it's pretty clear that i started at the bottom of the face for a reason i suppose subconsciously i was avoiding going back to them because i was nervous that i was going to do the same thing that despite my reservation despite my control that some part of me was going to get carried away or romanced by the retouching that i was doing and so even though i was cognizant of that i was still nervous that it was going to happen because it happened once and so of course it could happen again so i spent as much time as i could avoiding the area that i was nervous about i guess it's akin to delaying homework that you have to do no matter how much you procrastinate it will never go away and to a certain degree procrastination just builds it up into a bigger beast so perhaps next time as i'm narrating this video i am considering that maybe i should start with the part that's the hardest ignore the low-hanging fruit jump right into the part that i am most nervous about get it out of the way don't build it up into something bigger jump right into the deep end anyhow i say this now and it's easy to say in hindsight but all the while i was still nervous about this retouching and it took more time it was a slower process because i was really holding my breath as i came to the nose it became clear that just retouching the areas of loss still wouldn't suffice because there were large chunks of the features that were missing the top half of the nostril and the bridge the cheekbone all missing and if i just left them toned and tinted well that may work for a sky but it certainly won't work for a face because we would look right at it and instead of seeing past the damage we would be drawn to it it's that uncanny valley effect and that's something i didn't want so on to the eyes as i began retouching these eyes i realized that again there was just so much missing the bottom section of this eye on the left and the majority of the eye on the right were just gone and simply toning and tinting them would not cut it but there has to be a middle ground between leaving them as they are now which looks horrendous and the excessive work that i did on the first attempt at retouching there must be some middle ground there there must be some way of completing the image without doing too much or without making too large of an editorial decision leaving them just raw enough that they look well like they belong but not so raw not so empty and abused and damaged that we jump right to them and say well that doesn't look right why aren't there eyes there and it's really a hard thing to retouch something imperfectly our natural inclination is to make things perfect to fill them in crisp clean edges solid areas of color but that's not this painting there are no crisp edges here even where there should have been they are worn and abraded and so as i start to define parts of the eye i have to keep my lines looser a little bit rougher a little bit less defined which is a way of thinking that is unnatural it's much like asking a house painter to just kind of sloppily paint the house so that it matches the old hundred-year-old paint job i'm sure a master painter can do it but it'll take a rethinking a new approach and a conscious effort to do that work but i think that if one can shift their mindset change how they go about things deviate from their norm get out of the routine or rut and be a little bit more creative that it's totally possible it is completely plausible to add something to a painting retouching that actually looks old and weathered and worn maybe even a little damaged so that it fits in with the rest of the piece at least that's what i hope happens when i'm done well that was a long week lots of ups and downs lots of time spent in the chair lots of music and lots of podcasts but i'm done and i'm ready to apply the varnish for this painting i have chosen not to brush on the varnish but instead to spray it on i think that this is going to be a better method for this painting it's going to give me a very even layer of varnish and it's going to also allow me to control it in ways that i don't think i can achieve with the brush so respirator on gloves on just because i hate the way the varnish gets sticky on my fingers and then sticks to everything and then over to the painting and a couple of passes overlapping each time i cross the painting this is not terribly difficult once the hvlp system is set up one very rarely has to adjust it yes it takes a little time in the beginning but once it's perfect it's almost always perfect so back and forth and then as the varnish is starting to dry well i'm not 100 satisfied with it there are some uneven areas that i want to adjust for so i'm taking a piece of felt and i'm just lightly abrading the surface and this is going to give a more even unified sheen to which the next layer of varnish can stick sometimes the varnish goes on and while you expect it to react one way it reacts another way so this micro texture this evening out of the surface will create a nice sub layer for the next layer of varnish to go on and keep in mind these are incredibly thin layers of varnish this is not building up a thick thick coating it's so thin and that's one of the benefits of spraying varnish is that you can add layer upon layer you can't do that with a brush because the varnish reactivates the previous layer and the brush would then drag it and would create lines or it would get goopy or all sorts of bad things would happen now while that layer of varnish is setting up i'm switching to a different varnish a different sheen a gloss pure gloss and i'm spraying from a little bit higher up and i'm allowing some of this varnish to dry in the air as it's atomized and fall as a crystal to the surface of that tacky first layer these little crystals of glossy varnish will land and stick to the tacky varnish and then once dry they'll be incredibly glittery really beautiful again this is an effect that can't be achieved with brushing and now i am done both literally with the work and figuratively in that i cannot bear to do anything more to say that this was a salvage job really is an underestimation of how dire of a condition this painting was when it arrived the damage was clear but as i worked to undo all of the old work the damage just seemed to compound this was a tricky project it required threading a needle doing enough but not too much i totally missed the mark on the first retouching and had to go back in and correct it but ultimately i settled on a compromise that i'm satisfied with and i think my client will be too at least the painting can go back up on the wall and be enjoyed it's been salvaged there's so much there's so you're right there is there's so much left you haven't even finished the little dots other because it's museums just scribble no i can't oh yeah you can just do lines and then perfect university of illinois i wish i have to go slowly and i have to use this tiny little brush why didn't you just get a big brush well i can't do that that's against the rules for me and they'll just be done yeah but that's not how it works in this job i can't do that i have to go very slow what if you could just use a machine that would paint for you oh i would love that but nobody made that machine well i can't nobody sells one i hope you've enjoyed this video if you have questions or would like to learn more about this or any of my other projects head over to patreon where members get ad-free videos and get to ask questions that are answered in follow-up epilogue videos

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 472,477

Rating: 4.9667544 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: zl23ty45DnU

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021