Through The Looking Glass - From the Conservator's Perspective.

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] throughout the many videos i have created you have seen my studio you've seen me work you've seen the paintings on which i work and you have seen the work that i do but what you have not seen is what i see when i'm actually working that is the process of conservation from my perspective so for this video i figured let's flip it on its head and strap a camera to mine put on some binaural recording microphones and give you the sights and sounds of conservation as i see them and it all starts with this beautiful w m keith painting or at least i think it's a beautiful painting because i cannot imagine that this painting was supposed to be as brown as it is it doesn't really seem plausible that the artist wanted this to look that way now whether this is just an accumulation of surface grime dust dirt tobacco smoke or soot or some sort of surface coating varnish or shellac that has just really darkened over time remains to be seen but before i can find out those answers well i have to get this painting out of the frame and initially i see that a patch has been applied to the back of this canvas which indicates that it's been worked on in the past now i'm going to be using a pair of wire snips to remove these very impressive steel tacks at about an inch long they are some of the biggest i've seen probably seven or eight ounces and i have to take some care to remove them because they're heavily embedded in this wood and i don't want to destroy either the stretcher or the frame because that would create more work for myself now i'll save these for some project in the future maybe now removing the canvas from the frame i have to be really careful because as i go ahead and take a look at it well it's pretty clear that it's got some structural damage we can see one whole tacking edge is completely separated at the fold and that's something that i'm going to have to address later on but before i can do that i have to separate the canvas from the stretcher and so i'll take my tack pulling tool and i'll start to remove these old tacks and as i do this i notice that there is no sign of old tack holes meaning that while this painting has been worked on it doesn't appear to ever have been removed from the stretcher which means that the work may not have addressed all of the issues just something to keep in mind and once i have removed all of these tacks i can separate the canvas from the stretcher and i'm always going to be careful when i do this because as i pull up on the stretcher i notice that it's not releasing which indicates that maybe i've missed some tacks sure enough there's a little flap here that has some hidden tacks so after poking myself in the finger i will remove these other tacks that i hadn't caught before now imagine if i had just tugged on this stretcher until it came loose well i probably could have damaged these little pieces of canvas or even worse ripped the painting itself so being careful being deliberate and not making assumptions that just because i thought i removed all the tax all the taxes were gone is pretty critical but now we can see the canvas comes right away from the stretcher and looking at the stretcher it's in really great condition it's a little dirty but there's no damage which is great because i can reuse it now when i take a canvas off a stretcher i'm always prepared to find well gross things in between the stretcher and the canvas and in this case it's really no different there's a lot of dust dirt some little old insect shells and spider parts which always give me the heebie-jeebies but i don't use a vacuum here because i think it's too aggressive just a simple brush and removing it is fine i don't see any reason to take any unnecessary risks it is really a shame that this canvas has a square patch on it because it's really giving squares a bad name and they are pretty awesome i mean squarespace am i right so how awesome is squarespace well is the comprehensive one stop to get you online with your own website and whether you're interested in their thousands of award-winning gorgeous mobile-friendly templates or you just need something simple for your business or maybe you just want to tell your own story with the blog they've got you covered with search engine optimization analytics apps and tools you can even mobile edit your site and if that sounds like a lot to take in well don't worry they're not going to leave you hanging squarespace has a forum full of thousands of users just like you answering questions and helping out in fact squarespace will even help you find and register your own domain the starting point for all of your website dreams 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 now i could simply leave this canvas patch on and remove it later after the cleaning and sometimes i do that when i know that the patch or old structural repair is absolutely critical in maintaining the integrity of the painting through the next steps so if this were a huge tear i may leave the patch on during the cleaning process but in this case it's not a huge tear and i suspect that it's really really minor and so i'm not terribly concerned about the canvas falling apart when i do the cleaning what i am concerned about is a bump underneath the canvas while i am doing the cleaning and the edges of this patch could telegraph to the front and as i'm going over it with solvent or solution detergent or surfactant whatever it could create a mark and that would be something that i don't want to happen so i'm going to remove the patch now now this old patch has pretty much deteriorated and the glue has also failed and that's actually a nice change of pace because recently i've had to work on a lot of projects that have fought me every step of the way and while that is kind of par for the course getting a small patch that comes off fairly easily with the glue that has mostly deteriorated well it's easier and who doesn't like easy so after the patch is removed i'm going to take a cotton ball with a liquid enzyme solution i'm going to saturate this cotton ball and place it on the old adhesive and based on the age of this repair and what i could deduce from the powdery adhesive i think that this is most likely an animal based product either hide glue or rabbit skin and glue and so the application of this enzyme will cause the glue to swell become soft and then using my scalpel i can very easily scrape it off again much nicer than oh i don't know elmer's glue so sometimes old traditional materials even though they fail are conservators best friend because they're much much easier to remove and we have plenty of information about how to deal with these materials so it doesn't come as a surprise i can remove the excess adhesive and then with another cotton ball remove any remaining residues and well just like that in the matter of what a minute and a half or two that patch and the old adhesive is gone pretty easy huh now on to cleaning i did make some small tests so i am aware of what is on this painting and it turns out that it is not surface grime it's not dust dirt tobacco smoke or any of that it's shellac and a lot of it i mean lots of shellac probably several coatings and i mentioned that the painting had been worked on in the past and maybe the old varnish was just shellacked over and maybe over again and again but as we start to remove it oh look at that i mean that is just super exciting i've said it before and i will say it every single time i clean a painting and remove an old discolored varnish it is just super exciting to see what lies beneath now why shellac was used on a painting you know i don't have any real reason but my guess is that shellac is ubiquitous you can find it just about anywhere and it's commonly used on furniture in homes and so people may be familiar with how to use it whereas traditional varnishes are a little bit more esoteric and people who aren't in the arts may not know how to use them but one of the problems with shellac is that unless it is a high high quality shellac a really blonde or white shellac it has a yellow or orange tint to it and low quality shellac while it is not only orange it also degrades with exposure to uv light much faster than pure blonde shellac and so over time it starts to get yellow then orange then brown then really brown and then really really really brown and while that may be desirable in furniture or hardwood flooring or in homes where a patina is desired with fine art we don't want that i mean we don't want this beautiful blue sky to be brown nobody can make an argument that that is a good outcome really nobody can and so removing this old discolored shellac reveals ah reveals the best of what we find when we do con conservation it reveals a painting that has a whole range of color a real dynamism to it just this little strip in the sky we can start to see hints of clouds we can see that the sky isn't monotone it's got blues and greens even some grays in it makes the painting dynamic it makes it interesting and it well obviously makes it beautiful these clouds are creamy white clouds that we've all seen a million times before and they make the sky feel full removing this varnish is just super super satisfying i don't think there will be a day when i get tired of removing old discolored dirty varnishes it's just kind of the best part of the job and as i come to this really bright turquoise spot hey look at that there are even some birds in the sky that were totally obfuscated by that old shellac and varnish and so not only did it change the whole tenor of the painting we couldn't even see details like these birds and while cleaning the sky is obviously the most exciting and bright part of the painting maybe it's the showstopper that doesn't mean that cleaning the foreground or the trees or the dirt is any less important because even though it is brown and dark green it's not just one amorphous blob of color like it was with this old shellac on it there's a lot of variation in color that keith used there's delicate brushwork there are highlights coming through these trees that just can't be seen with this old coating and so yeah cleaning the sky is like super super exciting because we go from brown to blue but cleaning the other parts of the painting are just as exciting because we start to get a full sense of the space the painting gets volume it gets it gets almost three-dimensional when we can start to fill out the rest of it and so i always always leave the signature for last and the reason that i do that is that after cleaning the entire painting i have a really acute sense of the stability of the paint i understand if there are any colors that are fugitive or more vulnerable to the solvents i've experienced how this surface coating is removed and so i understand how much time it needs with the swab what kind of pressure i need to use so gathering all that data means that cleaning the signature is going to be easier and cleaning signatures is always tricky because sometimes artists thin out their paint to make it flow better and that can make the signature more vulnerable so i will clean around the signature inching up to it just on the edge and then i'll hit one or two letters just the edge and see if they're stable and if they are like in this case i can go ahead and fully remove the surface coating if they're not i may weaken my solvent to remove some of the surface coating but it is not uncommon to leave some of the old varnish or shellac on the surface of a signature just to be safe because we don't want to do any damage there and here we can see it says w keith just like on the frame and the provenance it's always nice when there's one signature that matches the provenance with all of that old shellac removed i noticed that the painting had several planar distortions and that you would be forgiven if you don't know what that means because you probably don't speak contrived conservator planar distortions are things that disrupt the plane of the painting in english bumps dents ripples and waves and we want to remove all of those so that the surface is flat and we can see the texture of the paint the impasto and also because once a varnish is applied it's going to enhance those distortions and we use the hot table to achieve this using moisture heat and pressure we can relax the canvas set it into a new state and then permanently keep it in that state and so i will place the painting on an absorbent cotton blotter paper i will surround it with cotton webbing that leads to the corner of my hot table where there is a hole and a tube connected to a vacuum pump that will extract the air in this envelope i'll tape it all down to make sure i have a nice tight seal which is really important because i don't want this pressure to be released midway through the process and then once i have this envelope or sandwich all completed i can turn off the heat because the table has been warming up while i've been doing this and turn on the vacuum pump now the air is going to be extracted from this envelope through that cotton webbing to the corner through the aluminum to that hole and that hose and it's going to provide consistent downward pressure on the painting and i can modulate that with a dial now i'm going to let the painting cool and that's going to take oh about 45 minutes give or take and keeping pressure on it will make sure that when it cools it stays in that flat state now once it is fully cool i'll transfer it over to another table place it under weights yup just a simple cinder block in between two pieces of sheetrock which is basically just gypsum board underneath some felt and bladder paper and leave it for a couple days and let it acclimatize and when it comes out well it is flat the back of the canvas is flat which means that any impasto any texture of the paint can now sit proud all of those dents and ripples and waves and even the cracks in the paint can be brought down so it's a really simple but really effective way of returning the painting to a state that the artist had it in when they completed the work and now i can start thinking about repairing the structural issues before i do any work i'm going to lay down a piece of siliconized p-e-t film or just non-stick mylar and this ensures that during the strip lining process the painting doesn't get adhered down to the table because that would be oh so very bad now these pieces of the original tacking edge have completely detached because the canvas is dry and brittle and in this case it's important to differentiate between doing a reinforcement and a strip lining reinforcement is with silk organza and a strip lining is with belgian linen in this case because the tacking edges are detached i'm going to use belgian linen and this is a lesson in not throwing things away because i have a bin of scraps of strip linings that i have used in the past and most of these are really small and so they don't really have much utility except when you have a small painting and so instead of having to cut more canvas spend all of that extra time and create more waste i can use pieces that were otherwise destined for the trash and not waste time or materials and i assure you these were not a plant this is just scrap now i also keep scraps of the adhesive film and generally i like to use one long piece cut from a roll but because julian forgot to order more adhesive film and didn't have any he has to turn to his scrap bin and again keeping the scraps is really helpful because it bailed me out in this situation luckily it's a really small painting so i don't need a ton of adhesive film but if i didn't have this scrap bin well i'd be up that proverbial river without that proverbial paddle and this adhesive film is both solvent and heat activated and so i could expose this tacking edge to some solvent and then press this adhesive film into it cold and it would bond and that's critical when the painting can't receive heat let's say it is an encaustic or a delicate material but in this case the canvas and the paint and all of the materials are heat tolerant so i can use an iron to apply the adhesive film down to the canvas i'll remove the backing from the adhesive film and then again using my iron i will start to tack this belgian linen canvas in place i'm going to apply heat starting at one end and just going over the area to make sure that there is a good bond and then once i've moved past i will take a weight with a little oak block underneath and place it on now you may notice that this is a different weight that i normally use and that's because one of my viewers saw me using those pieces of steel and thought to themselves oh my gosh julian's going to drop that weight and it's going to go right through a painting well yes i have dropped the weight never through a painting but almost always on my toes and let me tell you a 10 pound steel weight with sharp corners and sneakers that is not a recipe for success and so this viewer saw this problem and in their home machine shop milled up this piece of steel with this absolutely gorgeous brass handle and sent it to me and i love it it is now one of my favorite pieces of kit that i have in the studio now i use that block underneath the steel weight to make sure that as the canvas dries there is no distortion because we just did a whole procedure trying to get rid of those planar distortions and we don't want them to come back and now on to the repair of that little tear and it is really little i mean it's maybe a centimeter long so i don't need to do anything extravagant and i've chosen to do bridging and that's where these little strips of belgian linen are laid perpendicularly across the tear kind of like sutures and they will hold that tear down and together now this canvas isn't going to be under so much tension that this tear could run like in a nylon stocking but we want to make sure that it doesn't open up when we go to fill in the paint loss on the front or that it opens up with micro expansion from humidity changes and so bridging will hold it together and hold it flat so it's a nice light weight way of repairing a tear and i don't have to use a patch so after applying a little adhesive i can use a tool a bent dental tool to lay down these little strips of belgian linen fibers and through the magic of high-speed editing about seven minutes condensed into what seven seconds all of the bridging has been laid down i've applied the adhesive i've pressed it down with my fingers and then i'm going to apply a piece of siliconized pet film so that nothing sticks a piece of felt to pad that bump and then the weight and i'm gonna let it sit here for a day or two to let it dry i'll check on it every now and again and after a couple of days it's dry i can remove the weight remove the felt remove the film and the hole or tear is repaired and now the painting is ready to go back on the stretcher and if we look at this stretcher it still has the paper tape on it and normally i would remove this paper tape because it just is gross and it doesn't need to be there but the client gave me explicit instructions to not remove the paper tape and while i don't necessarily agree with it that's what they want and that's what they get now there is some writing on the paper tape and i suspect that's why the client wants to keep it there i don't think that that writing is original because that paper tape is usually applied by a framer but it's not my painting so i follow the rules now stretching a painting is pretty simple tacks placed in the center of each edge and once they're there i'll flip the painting to the other side pull it taut and apply some more tacks on that side and what i'm doing is trying to get the center of the painting taut without any waves or distortions and if there are waves or distortions or slack i'm going to move them to the corners where it's easier to compensate for them and where the keying process has more effect now this is a very small painting so it is a very quick stretching process which i like sometimes it's nice to not have to spend a lot of time stretching a painting now once i have gotten all of the tacks in i can start to trim off the excess canvas and this is something that's actually pretty important because if i didn't trim it off and i just folded it in it would bulk up these corners and it doesn't seem like a lot two four layers of canvas but it can add up and it can create oh an eighth of an inch at each corner and an eighth of an inch and an eighth of an inch is a quarter of an inch and now all of a sudden the painting doesn't fit into the rabbit of the frame and we've got a problem so where i used three ounce tacks to secure the canvas to the stretcher i'm using one and a half ounce tax to secure the extra canvas to the back and the weight of the tax just goes to signify the heaviness or the size of the tax obviously a seven ounce tack is a bigger tack than a one ounce stack having multiple tacks at your disposal is just nice now on this end i'm going to fold the canvas over twice because this is where the writing is and it'd be pretty bad form for the client to tell me not to remove the paper tape with the writing and then to go ahead and cover it up with my canvas so hopefully this will make the client happy and i suspect that this client will be looking at the back a little bit more than maybe some other clients because of course there were specific instructions about the back and i don't want to make my clients unhappy it's not good business it's not good karma so hopefully this will make them happy and i'm gonna tuck in these corners and put them to bed all nice and tidy and hope that they have sweet dreams because i think it looks really good and well that's it i think it looks really good so once i'm done with all of the tacking i can put the keys into this stretcher and the stretcher is different than a strainer because the joints where the pieces of wood connect aren't glued or nailed they're free-floating and they have a mortise here where i can stick this key in and i can hammer it down and it just adds a tiny bit of tension by expanding the joint and we're talking like 64th of an inch here but even that little amount can make sure that this canvas stays taut and over time as the canvas may loosen up with humidity changes well instead of taking it off the stretcher and restretching it we can just key it out a little bit so that's why stretchers are far superior to strainers with all of the tacks in place i can go ahead and cut some fishing line and thread them through the key holes and bind those keys to the stretcher and i'm not terribly concerned about losing some of these keys they're just wood they can be replaced easily and they're not original so it's not like any content is being lost but i don't want them to become loose and fall in between the canvas and stretcher and create a bulge so everything is good to go now and all i have to do is fill in the damage on the front which consists of a very small chip and a very small scratch and again i am glad that the damage here is really minimal because every once in a while it's nice to have a painting that doesn't require two or three weeks of retouching to complete i'm going to use a putty to fill in these gaps because i want the texture to be the same even if the color is matched if there's a divot it's going to look goofy and the client's going to see that so i'll over fill let this fill in medium dry and then in a couple of minutes as it started to harden i will use a dampened cotton swab to remove the excess because i just want to fill in where paint has been lost i don't want to overfill and feather it out so just where there's loss i put putty and with that we're ready to go and retouch now the retouching process is one of my favorite certainly the cleaning is one of excitement because i get to see what a painting truly looks like but retouching is where i the conservator get to put the painting back together and eliminate the damage now i prefer to retouch against artificial light as opposed to natural light and that's because natural light is variable from day to day time of day season and artificial light is consistent i use two led boxes where the kelvin is adjustable and that means that i can change the color or temperature of the light from about 2500 kelvin which is candlelight very orange very yellow very dim all the way to like 6 000 which is obnoxiously bright white almost blue and that helps because sometimes clients galleries dealers museums even private collectors will tell me what light bulbs they use in their home or museums and then i can calibrate my retouching lights to what they have in situ and that means that it's going to give me the best chance of matching the colors perfectly for the environment in which the painting is going to reside because under 2500 kelvin a color can look different than under 5500 kelvin so luckily this is just a very small amount of retouching but that doesn't mean that it is fundamentally any easier i still have to labor to mix the paint and match the color just because it's a small piece of damage doesn't mean i can randomly throw a color up i have to make sure that it matches because i don't want anyone to see it and these paints are fundamentally different than oil paints because well they contain no oil now over time oil when exposed to oxygen oxidizes it crosslinks and polymerizes it gets hard turns into a solid which is why oil paints last for hundreds upon hundreds of years but hardened oil paint isn't removable and so if i was using oil paint here in 100 years my paint would become part of the painting which is kind of against the whole tenant and understanding of the ethics of conservation so by using a paint with resin which dries through solvent evaporation we can be sure that in 5 10 100 years if this retouching ever needs to be removed for whatever reason it can be with the application of solvent and this resin has been laboratory tested for hundreds of years in simulated aging boxes and while it does get a little bit more difficult to remove over time it still can be removed which is absolutely critical because nothing a conservator does should ever be permanent hard stop and so using these paints makes sure that my work can be undone another benefit of these paints is that the resin fluoresces very strongly under ultraviolet light so if you take an ultraviolet or black light yeah the same one that you did or maybe still have in your room hanging above a poster and you shine it on a painting that's got retouching you can see that old retouching and that allows somebody a dealer collector museum muse or an auction house to see the old work and to judge whether it was appropriate or excessive and in this case they'll be able to see that i just put paint where paint was missing totally appropriate and the last up of any conservation is the application of a new synthetic resin ultraviolet stable fully reversible varnish so pretty much the complete opposite of what was on here before and it would be comical to spray this varnish on given the size of this painting so i'm going to use a brush and even at that this brush is comically large for this small painting or is it using a bigger brush means i have to make less passes means i have less brush strokes means i have more control so using a big brush actually makes a lot of sense on a small painting so with just a couple of strokes left to right and up to down i can apply the varnish to the painting and that's just about it now i'm going to go back and remove some of the varnish so that there's not so much and then i'm going to let it start to dry let some of the solvent evaporate and as it starts to get tacky i'm going to go ahead and go over the varnish and brush it out and this is a technique that i've employed and kind of developed for myself that allows me to add a micro texture to the surface of this varnish that is if i don't want it super slick or super shiny i can go back and forth and kind of scuff it up add some texture and diffuse the way the light reflects off of it and so i can get a really beautiful velvety satiny finish which i think looks really really good which is why i continue to use this technique and after about an hour or so of letting the varnish dry i can head over to my table where i'm going to put it in the frame oh hello go no not today so this is a padded table to make sure that i don't do any damage when i'm wrapping up paintings and look at that the painting fits perfectly into the rabbit now instead of using big old tacks i'm going to be using screws and little z or s clips and these are just little metal brackets with screws that will hold the painting into the frame they don't do as much damage as a tack or a nail driven through the stretcher into the frame and they are super easy to install and more importantly super easy to remove which is always a good thing and now finally after 35 minutes i can show you what you came here for the final painting which i think is why you watch these videos yeah what do i know anyhow from the painting as i received it really not a painting at all a brown amorphous blob with no colored differentiation no detail no sense of space to a whole nother painting one with a bright silvery sky birds that couldn't be seen before trees that are really delicately painted an entire image a world opened up one that i think my client is going to enjoy for many years so this is ridiculous

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 351,580

Rating: 4.9683571 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: 9HowbckxJTo

Length: 37min 50sec (2270 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021