What Is Adequacy? Conserving Sir Winston Churchill

support for this video comes from skillshare which offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people on topics including illustration design photography video freelancing and more the subject painting for this video is small it's a landscape and it's charming if a bit quaint now it was executed by an artist who was anything but small and quaint you see the artist in question was sir winston churchill a man known for his larger-than-life footprint now this painting was executed in oil on a small piece of canvas and at some point later on in the painting's life it was mounted or lined to a piece of hardboard something like masonite now this hardboard is a general building product and not something that is ideal for paintings because it is full of acid full of unknown materials it decomposes and can take the painting with it now when this painting was last worked on and it was mounted to this piece of hardboard well the work wasn't great and we can see all sorts of waves and ripples that have been embedded into the canvas and these waves and ripples are distracting because they force us to see the surface of the painting and not the image they take away the sense of space and depth that churchill was trying to create and force us to see the texture of these ripples and we're going to address that and also we're going to clean the painting because it's quite dirty and remove the old varnish generally we're going to take the opportunity while we have the painting in the studio to correct all of the things that we could just call adequate because well what is adequacy now churchill took up painting after he left office as a way to relieve stress and as a fun hobby and i can totally see why he might want something that was stress relieving given that he had just led a country through a world war churchill was self-taught he didn't take any lessons and he had no formal instruction but you know i bet if he were around today he wouldn't go it alone he'd probably turn to some place like skillshare skillshare is the online home to millions of people just like you curious creative who are looking to explore that creativity indulge their passions or sometimes just learn something new and if you're feeling a bit stressed out worn thin and overwhelmed lately i mean who isn't i might suggest acrylic painting how to paint an abstract landscape with lorianne gonzalez she'll walk you through materials techniques and a way of seeing the space around you that will have you lost in the world and not thinking of all the chaos that surrounds you i mean there's a reason why so many world leaders pick up painting when they leave office it's incredibly mesmerizing and relaxing and even a bit zen the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity so we're all chilled we're all relaxed and we're all going outside to paint landscapes right really i mean you should try it it's incredibly fun back to the painting at hand and the first thing i need to do is to face the painting with washi kozo that's japanese mulberry paper and i'm doing that because i need to remove this painting from this old masonite and i don't want to take the chance that the painting is going to get damaged scratched or any of the paint is going to come become detached when i'm handling it so i'll take a piece of paper and i'll use a ruler to tear it i could certainly use a knife but this is an old trick from print making days where i can just use the edge of the ruler to peel the paper back and get a nice crisp edge and once i've got this paper trimmed to a size that's appropriate for the painting i don't need to use too much here i can start to apply the fish gelatin and this of course has been warmed up on the stove because it solidifies when it's cold and of course keeping it in the refrigerator makes it into a jelly of sorts and it doesn't flow and it can't be applied when it's cold and stiff so by heating it up it allows it to flow and it turns it into a liquid now this is a really small painting so i can just use a little brush to apply it if the painting were larger i might use a roller or i might even spray it but generally a brush is a fine way to apply this adhesive now fish gelatin is not as strong as something like rabbit skin glue or hide glue the shellatin breaks down pretty easily with exposure to moisture or water so it's going to come off relatively easily when i need it to if i was using something like hide glue it would take a lot more effort and it would require a labor that probably wasn't appropriate for a painting now once the paper is embedded into the first layer of adhesive i'll go over it again with a little bit more just to make sure that i've got good purchase and contact and that all those air bubbles are removed because of course we can't expect this paper to do its job if it's not actually bonded to the surface of the painting so getting rid of as many of these air bubbles as possible is really critical to making sure that this paper has good purchase on the surface of the painting and again because it's a small painting i can use the brush and take my time i don't have to worry about this adhesive drying too quickly on larger paintings that can be an issue and that's generally why it's always advised to work in smaller sections so that you're not chasing drying glue or kind of getting out in front of your skis and getting overwhelmed and then once this is all covered i can let it dry for a day and then i can move on to the next procedure now i mentioned that what we need to do in order to relieve the issue of the waves and ripples is to take this painting off of this hardboard now in the past you've seen me use various tools and approaches to remove the board from the painting and that's totally okay when the board is going to be discarded or isn't necessary to save but in this case because of that label on the back and because the client didn't want this board damaged or destroyed i can't just shave the board down using routers or planes or scalpels i have to remove the painting from the board and the first thing i'm going to do is take a scalpel and just start to work an edge to see what kind of adhesion i have a little exploration now unfortunately this is not a heat activated glue and it's not a water activated glue it is a contact cement just like the contact cement that you would buy at the hardware store for craft projects which is totally fine except in the field of art contact cement is not an appropriate adhesive to use on a painting and unfortunately there's no easy way of removing it i have to slowly peel back this canvas just a little bit at a time and use a highly evaporative solvent on a brush to soften up that adhesive just enough that i can peel it back and then by the time i go and recharge the brush with solvent the solvent that i had just applied has fully evaporated and that's really important because i don't want this solvent to be sitting underneath this canvas for a long time and so by using one that has a high evaporation rate i can ensure that there's minimal contact between the solvent and the original painting now it also needs to last just long enough to soften up that glue and so that's where choosing the right solvent is really necessary and as you can see there's nothing fast or quick about this now it's not terribly difficult apply a little difficult apply a little solvent peel back the canvas apply a little solvent peel back the canvas lather rinse repeat so on and so forth but i have to be really careful because i don't know how brittle this canvas is and i don't yet know why it was laid down onto this hardboard there could be some major structural flaws in this canvas or it could be compromised in a way that i'm not yet aware of so by moving really slowly i can ensure that if i do find something along the way that it's concerning i'll catch it in time before it becomes a problem for this removal process now one thing about contact cement is even though when i soften it it releases it becomes sticky again once that solvent evaporates and so if i don't keep pulling up this canvas when it falls back down it will re-bond to that hardboard which is kind of a bummer because it means that i really can't put this aside and move on to something else if i get sick of it this is one of those projects where i need to work through it in one fell swoop now luckily for me it's small so it's not going to take a tremendous amount of time i mean just imagine if it was the size of the table i've been there i've done that and that is a long day now even though this is small it does take a lot of time and it's going to take probably about an hour and a half an hour and 45 minutes to remove this canvas from this board and again part of that is because i don't want to destroy the board but also that's just the nature of working with a contact cement and that's one reason among many that conservators absolutely hate contact cement fundamentally laying a canvas down on a rigid surface is not problematic it is not verboten and it's something that gets done quite a bit in fact you've seen me do it on previous videos sometimes a stretcher isn't the most appropriate support for a painting or sometimes the client's budget just won't allow it or sometimes the board is the right substrate for a painting but choosing the right adhesive and choosing the right method of executing that treatment that well that's where the devil is in the details because the wrong adhesive the wrong approach and the wrong materials can result in disastrous results now luckily i have a little bit of experience doing this so i already know what i'm going to do and we'll get to that later on but i still have to work on getting this canvas off now thus far i haven't found anything that would lead me to believe that this lining or mounting to this hardboard was necessary there are no major holes there are no major tears and the canvas itself looks really really healthy it's not deteriorated it's not threadbare it's not falling apart so this essentially appears to be a case of unnecessary work for no real good reason now it's probable that this canvas was never mounted or stretched to anything the churchill painted it on a small piece of canvas without support and at some point the conservator or the dealer or somebody decided to mount it because it was impossible to frame without mounting that's not necessarily true but that's what i think happened so now with the canvas fully removed i can go ahead and start removing the adhesive residue from both the board and the canvas and that's super important because a the contact cement is disgusting and b it will interfere with the next procedure now when removing the contact cement from this hardboard i really don't need to be all that delicate the goal is to get all of this adhesive off and frankly as quickly as possible because i don't want to spend a lot of time doing this so i can take some solvent and a cotton ball and i can start to saturate the adhesive with this solvent and once the adhesive absorbs that solvent and swells it becomes pliable and i can start to remove it and you can see that with enough friction it starts to gum up and as it gums up when i roll those little balls around it helps pick up more of the adhesive residue kind of like rubber cement is used to lift up rubber cement and so once i've gotten this all cleaned i can go ahead to start removing the adhesive from the canvas now luckily there is not a ton of adhesive on the back of the canvas but i still need to get rid of it and so again i'll take a cotton cotton ball with a little bit of solvent and i'll apply that solvent to a small section and start to lift off that adhesive now because there's very little adhesive on the canvas it comes off pretty easily but again i'm going to try to roll any of the existing residue off to limit the solvent exposure and i can take a new piece of cotton and go over it and wherever the cotton sticks i'll know that there's still a little bit of adhesive that needs to be removed luckily not much but you can see just at the bottom there there's a section where i didn't hit with the solvent so i'm going to take it hit it remove the adhesive clean off the residue and then move on to another part of the canvas now there were some sections where the hardboard actually stuck to the canvas and peeled off and so i can remove those with a sharp scalpel and i'm just going and slicing those little areas off and then i can come back later and remove any adhesive residue i want to take care not to slice the canvas but just to separate that hardboard residue from the canvas it's not terribly difficult but if i don't remove this it'll leave a bump that will manifest on the front of the painting and well that wouldn't be adequate work at all now with all of the adhesive residue removed i'm going to go over to the hot table to do a treatment to flatten and relax this canvas effectively to get rid of all of those little ripples and waves now i'm sandwiching it in between two sheets of nylon release film and placing it on a cotton blotter the cotton blotter will hold the moisture and absorb any adhesive residue that may want to drift and the nylon release films make sure that the painting doesn't stick to that blotter or to the mylar p-e-t film that i'm going to apply on the surface to create the envelope for the air to be drawn out now it's essential to have an airtight pocket here because i need to have even consistent pressure and if this pocket has any leaks well the vacuum pump will suck air out but it won't apply enough pressure so i'm taping it down to make sure that it's flat and even and then i'm going to go with some more tape and go around the entire perimeter making sure i have an airtight seal now it's certainly possible to use sandbag weights on the edges to create a seal but i want to make sure that i have no air leaks whatsoever there are cases where you may want to have air leaks though i can't see how that would be really beneficial because if you wanted less pressure you could just adjust that at the vacuum pump in any event the heat goes on i'll adjust it to about 110 degrees fahrenheit and then i'll turn the vacuum pump on adjust the pressure and draw out all of that air from that envelope i'm going to work any ripples out of the envelope just to make sure that it's nice and flat and smooth because of course we're trying to get rid of ripples not keep them now once the painting has reached temperature i'll turn the heat off and allow the painting to cool once the painting is cooled i can take it out of this envelope and i'll try to save as much of this pet film as i can because it's wasteful to not save it and i can reuse it so there's no reason not to i'm going to peel back these pieces of nylon release and i'm going to take the painting over to my other table and place it under weights this is necessary because there is still ambient moisture left in the canvas and if i don't do this the canvas is going to distort and again we're going to get ripples once the painting has relaxed for several days and has acclimatized i can begin the process of applying the adhesive that i'm going to use to mount this painting generally you've seen me use a roller for this but in this case the roller is bigger than the painting itself and so it is easier and safer to just use a brush if i were to use the roller there is a chance that the roller would pick up the painting and distort it as the adhesive was being applied so again sometimes you have to break your own rules to suit what is required by the painting so i'm going to apply this with a brush and try to get a nice even coat on the entire back of the canvas now this adhesive is heat and solvent activated so it's warm and i have to let it cool before i can move on to the next step now because i need something rigid to mount this canvas to i'm going to use a piece of museum board which is a cotton rag board that's compressed and dyed black and is acid free but in order to use this i need to first apply the same adhesive film to this board and there's nothing terribly complicated about this i'm going to cut a piece of the film to roughly about the size of the painting a little bit larger and i'm going to peel it off of the backing and then i'm going to apply it to this board using an iron nothing complicated but this is absolutely necessary because without this layer of film attached to this board the adhesive that i applied to the canvas would just be completely absorbed by this board during the mounting process and it wouldn't provide a strong enough bond now i'm using that steel weight where i'm following the iron because whenever you apply heat to something any residual moisture will turn to steam and it can distort whatever it is you're heating up now i'm going to flip this board over and i'm going to apply adhesive film to the back of it and you may be thinking why i thought you were just mounting this canvas to this board and calling it a day well i am but i'm actually using this board as an interleave between the canvas and the old hardboard you see this will be the meat in the sandwich i suppose and because it's acid free archival and stable it's a perfectly fine surface to mount to painting to and will act as a barrier to make sure that none of that acid or formaldehyde or whatever is in that hardboard ever reaches the painting or leeches to the painting so we can keep the original hardboard with the painting keep the appearance of it yet we can eliminate all of the downsides of using an imperfect material and at the end of the day the painting will be more stable and look better and nobody will be the wiser now again i need to apply a piece of this adhesive film to the hardboard i could certainly try to paint it onto the hardboard but i don't need that much and once i've applied this thin film layer it will be plenty to provide a strong bond to that eight ply museum board that i'm using as an interleaf so again just using the iron and making sure that i've got good contact and good purchase i'm not using the steel there because that hardboard is not going to deform like the eight ply will and so now i can start to assemble the sandwich first comes the hard board then comes the eight ply and then will come the painting and luckily for me this painting and this hardboard are square on two sides the corner closest to the camera the bottom corner is square so i can use that as a reference point and back to the hot table it's funny because when i go back and i look at these videos i realize just how much i use this hot table and just how important it is for any modern conservator to have one it's kind of like having a range in a kitchen or a table saw in a wood shop yes you can accomplish the same treatments and get the same results without it but they're not going to be as precise and the results may not be as predictable i mean imagine trying to bake a cake over a campfire it'll still be tasty oh no doubt but it may not look as good so the hot table is a really critical piece of kit for any conservator anyhow i just thought i'd mention that because i seem to be spending a lot of time in front of it so again i'm going to be making a sandwich the same way that i did before using a piece of pet film and taping it down and then i'm going to turn the heat on the table and get to mounting this sandwich all together now this requires more heat than the previous treatment up to 150 degrees or so so it's going to take a little bit longer to heat up and then it needs to soak in that heat for just a little bit maybe about 10 or 15 minutes and then i can turn the heat off and allow it to cool slowly and allowing it to cool slowly is actually really critical if i just turn the heat off the table and cool it quickly everything is going to start to distort and deform so i'm actively cooling it i'm making sure that it cools at a deliberate rate so it's not as if the heat gets completely turned off and it just cools based on ambient temperature and heat loss the table will slowly reduce the heat so that there's no sudden change of course even adequate pressure and making sure that we have no air bubbles and no leaks is critical to using the hot table now i'm using a piece of balsa wood here to go over the face of the painting just to make sure all of the edges are really bonded down and falsely wood is really soft so it's going to deform if it comes to any impasto on the painting and now after a few hours of heating and cooling i can remove the painting from the envelope and it will be bonded to the 8-ply museum board which in turn will be bonded to the hardboard it will not have distorted or deformed it will be pancake flat and it will be stable but of course there's too much board and there's all this facing so i'm going to remove this facing by applying just a bit of warm water to the paper and allowing that adhesive that's underneath and on top of the paper to swell and soften and once it swells and softens i can remove it and all that will be left is a little bit of glue residue sometimes removing this washi cozo is easy and it comes off in big sections and sometimes it doesn't and in this case because the painting has been on the hot table twice that adhesive bond has been activated and reactivated under pressure so this washi cozo is really well bonded to the surface of the painting so it's going to take a little bit more elbow grease to get it off luckily i don't have to use any hard tools i can just allow the water to do its job and break down that fish gelatin adhesive then i can take a little palette knife and start to work the paper off of the surface now i'm trying to not scratch the surface of the painting just use this to lift up the paper a little bit so that i can get a better grip on it and remove it later on there's no need to rush this i'm not late for any appointments and getting done quicker isn't going to make the conservation any better so i'll just take my time and slowly roll this back now i'm using the edge of this palette knife but it's really a blunt edge and it's using the built up paper along that edge to push the paper in front of it kind of like a bulldozer rather than a shovel on a icy driveway i don't know if that makes any sense maybe it does maybe not and once all of that paper is removed i'm going to remove the adhesive residue all of that fish skeleton that didn't come off with the paper and one ancillary benefit of using washi cozo and fish gelatin is that any surface grime that is susceptible to water will largely come up during this process making it so that i don't need to use any enzyme cleaners or other detergents to remove the accumulated surface grime so it's kind of a two for one and even though i have to destroy some beautiful paper the paper is doing me a favor by removing some of this old surface grime with all that surface grime and all of that adhesive residue removed i can start to remove the old varnish and i'm gonna roll a little swab because this is a little painting and i'm gonna take a mild solvent mixture and i'm gonna start cleaning in an area where i had previously made a test and by rolling the swab over and softening up that varnish and lifting it we can see just how dirty this painting is again there's nothing terribly complicated about this process and because it's a small painting it at least conceptually seems easier than if it were a really big painting and i don't know that that's necessarily true but when i'm looking at a small painting that i have to clean it feels easier so that's a nice added bonus of working on a little piece and though the painting didn't really look all that dirty as we remove the varnish we can see that it really was discolored and it needed to come off and as we do so we can start to see some pinks and purples in the sky where before we just kind of saw brown and green and really the sky isn't green at all it's blue cleaning process is always really fun because i get to see perhaps for the first time in generations what the painting looked like when the artist in this case churchill decided that it was complete and so i'm going back in time and kind of seeing their work for the first time and this is a pretty bright painting so cleaning the varnish off makes a big difference now of course we have all of this excess board that needs to be removed and the way that i'm going to be removing it is with a very sharp blade and simply cutting it off now i've made sure that there is no canvas to the right of this ruler that is i am not cutting off any of the canvas and if i've done my job right and aligned this canvas and this board properly with the hardboard underneath when i cut this piece of 8-ply museum board off it should be perfectly aligned with the hardboard underneath and we should have a nice clean edge and no loss of original canvas because that would be an abject failure certainly not adequate and so there we can see it a nice clean edge and with the other three sides trimmed i can go ahead and fill in the areas of damage now i did find a very small perhaps one centimeter tear on the upper edge and a little bit on the right edge so that is probably why this painting was mounted to this hardboard but you've seen enough videos to know that a small tear like that does not require a mounting or a lining there are other ways of fixing little damage like that that are less invasive and have a smaller footprint once the fill-in medium has dried i can remove it with a little bit of water and some cotton swabs i don't roll my own cotton swabs for this because these little guys are so efficient and when you buy them by the 10 000 you have them lying everywhere so you gotta use them making sure that all of the excess fill-in material is removed is pretty important because i don't want to cover up any of churchill's original paint i just want to fill in the areas where the paint has been lost or where there are gaps in the canvas and the funny thing about this is that this edge that i'm working on right now will be totally concealed by the frame and the rabbit so there may not even need be a need for me to do that now before i apply any retouching to this painting i'm going to be applying an isolation layer and i often talk about how the isolation layer serves several purposes well in this case i want to protect this paint layer from my retouching you can see the painting doesn't change a whole bunch so it's not about matching color in this case the paint is actually pretty vulnerable to certain solvents that may be used in the future to remove the retouching so by putting down this layer of synthetic resin that is removable with very mild solvent i can ensure that if my retouching ever needs to be removed it can be done so by removing that synthetic layer and now on to retouching i have a little split screen here because it's not terribly interesting retouching but i want you to see how the colors get mixed and how i match them and how i go about the retouching process so if i don't hit the mark right off the bat with the color which is totally normal i'm going to apply a base to just start to break up the areas of damage and then as that dries i can start to see if i need to be darker or lighter or if i need to be more green or if i need to be more red if it needs to be cooler or warmer and then with that information i'll go ahead and i'll change my color i'll mix in some browns or blacks or yellows or whites depending on what it's called for and then i'll go ahead and start retouching again now these paints dry very quickly they're not oil paints they have a synthetic resin in them that evaporates pretty quickly now now these paints unlike oil paints do not have a long open time that is they dry very quickly so by the time i have left the painting with my brush gone back to the palette mixed the color and come back to the painting that first layer of paint is already dry that's nice because it means that i can work fairly quickly i can apply several layers of paint without having to worry about muddying the previous layer up with the new layer but it also is difficult because i can't blend this paint because it dries so quickly you just can't feather and you can't blend on the canvas now ultimately that's really unfortunate for painters but for conservators it is absolutely critical because it is always tempting to just blend it a little bit just a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and then the next thing you know you have over painted the entire sky because you were just blending a little bit so by making sure that this paint does not have the ability to be blended it keeps the conservator honest and it also makes sure that we're not going to get excessive over painting now that said there are certainly times when i wish that i could take a one inch brush and just cover the entire area with a thick layer of overpainting and call it a day but that's not what's allowed that violates all of the ethics that conservators sign on to and operate by one of the added benefits about this paint because it has a resin in it it can be softened or reactivated with solvent so even though my palette looks kind of messy and dirty i can use all of the color that's on it i just have to apply a little solvent and then i can reactivate that purple or that red or that muddy green brown gray color that i have in there now in the main field of the painting there are all these little areas of abrasion and i'm not going to try to touch all of them up because that would result in a ton of retouching and it would also look artificial the sky would be completely flat while the rest of the painting still had abrasions but i'm going to break up the biggest ones the ones that are really distracting and this is a small painting it's probably going to be viewed from about 12 to 18 inches away maybe a little bit more maybe a little less so at that distance any areas of damage or loss that i see that my eye goes to or that i find distracting would be candidates for retouching and with the retouching dry i can apply the final coating of varnish and because i've already applied a layer of varnish i can't brush it on because it'll disturb that first layer so i'm going to use a spray system and watch closely because i am just about done yeah that's it small little painting doesn't require a lot of varnish now before it goes back in the frame i have to do a little work on the frame and this is not a ton of work but this painting was behind glass and we don't want to have this painting behind glass not only because this glass is not uv protectant or anti-glare but it just doesn't need it the varnish will protect it and this glass makes it hard to see the painting so i'm going to remove all these pieces of scrap wood that were put there to hold it in place and remove these framers points or i think they're glazers points yeah they look like glazers points and these hold the glass into place and with these gone i can take the glass out and i will probably save the piece of glass in my storage for several years until i decide one day to clean out my storage and then i'll throw it away and now we can put the painting into the frame and because this painting fits this frame perfectly i don't need any fillers or spacers i can just drop it in and i'm going to be using z-clips or s-clips to hold this painting in to its frame four is plenty and i will apply them and screw them in and then this painting will be all secure and ready to go up on the wall well actually not all secure see i have to add my label i generally add the label when i inventory the painting when i receive it but because the original inventory label was lost i'll just write up a new one and apply it to the back and this contains an id number and some granular information about the retouching and varnish that i used for the next conservator and here we have the finished painting and i've deliberately left the light on to catch on the painting because i want you to see the surface and in particular i want you to see what's not there no ripples no waves no creases none of the old artifacts from the previous work remain and that's precisely what we were trying to achieve now yes the painting is cleaner it is brighter it looks more alive and some of the splatter that was on the surface was also removed but really this was about making sure that there were no distractions in viewing the painting and that the painting was preserved so because it's on that eight ply museum board we don't have to worry about the acid from the hardboard leeching through and discoloring the painting or decomposing and taking the painting with it you see now it's stable and we've preserved the look of the painting so before we can see that's yellowed some splatter in the lower right corner and the raking light catches those ripples cleaned and mounted the ripples are gone the yellowed varnish is gone the splatter in the lower right is gone and the painting is ready to go back up on the wall and be enjoyed by everybody so thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed this video take care you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 790,608

Rating: 4.9512858 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, classical, William Churchill, churchill, oil on canvas

Id: SCpOyxoCEiw

Length: 40min 53sec (2453 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/zyzzogeton]

That was one of the more heavy-handed product placements... but if it pays for content like this... I guess I'll allow it.

[u/scrapper]

I still see plenty of ripples.