Wood That It Were So Simple: Conserving a Split Panel Painting Part 4

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 [Music] one of the things that makes a project of this scope and scale so complicated and difficult is just the sheer number of balls in the air that need to be managed that is the materials the techniques the equipment the procedures that all need to be harnessed and controlled and directed into one final result so that success can be guaranteed and with every one of those variables there exists the potential for conflict that is something to go wrong and for success to be jeopardized but if those potential areas of conflict are seen in advance if they're controlled for they can be converted into opportunities even assets and that's exactly where we are with this project now if we remember two of my major concerns were structural stability and integrity and movement because this panel is delicate it has a history of breaking and I wanted to make sure that that is addressed also this painting is going into a fairly inhospitable final location so I came up with the solution of adding a honeycomb fiberglass panel to the back of the original wood panel and that's gonna add a lot of structural support and make sure that this original painting this panel isn't vulnerable in the future now I also thought that that honeycomb panel would control the movement of the wood because of course this honeycomb panel is pan flat it's stable it's impervious to temperature and humidity change and so that would stop the wood from moving well I'm glad that there were some lingering thoughts that I had in my head because I reached out to a bunch of different people to find out how they deal with wood movement now I talked to furniture conservators and by and large they said wood movement it is what it is it's not really something that we can stop or control for we're ok with it I talked to some furniture builders who said yeah what movement it's not great but we control for it we plan that into our projects we don't do things where wood movement would be catastrophic I also talked to a couple of veneer manufacturing companies and they said what we've largely eliminated wood movement and that caught my attention so I talked to them some more and I found out that the way that they deal with wood movements and the way they eliminate it is by using some incredibly strong adhesives but he says that unfortunately are not reversible and so for painting conservation they're just not acceptable because one of the tenants of all the work that I do is that it must be reversible in the future if ever it needs to be undone so I started looking at other adhesives that were reversible and started seeing if any of them would be able to stop the wood movement and unfortunately I kept on running up against adhesives that just weren't strong enough to prevent this wood from moving not to mention even if I did use a reversible adhesive in order to reverse it the adhesive would need to be subject to either heat or solvent and in between this honeycomb panel and the original wood panel there'd be no way for a solvent to penetrate so solvent reversible adhesives wouldn't necessarily work and this honeycomb panel is an incredibly good insulator so the heat required to soften heat activated adhesive would have to be so high that it would really run the risk of doing damage to this painting so now I have a two-fold problem I can't stop the wood from moving and I can't even use any of the Hesus that I thought I could use and in my head was swimming and so I started looking outside of the box and thinking about where disparate materials have to be bonded together in environments where there is constant movement and it landed me in the homebuilding industry and talking to some contractors specifically tiling contractors because tile is either stone porcelain ceramic terracotta it's brittle its rigid it doesn't move and it often gets bonded to a wood based substrate real wood OSB plywood engineered wood and all of those do move they are flexible and that difference in flexibility can potentially cause the bond between the tile and the substrate to fail and the tile could crack or it could pop right off and the whole project would be a failure kind of like what we have here and so the home building industry has come up with a very novel approach to dealing with this movement and it's called an uncoupling or decoupling membrane uncoupling membrane decoupling membrane what is that well simply put it is a material that goes in between two different materials where they have different rates of movement and it allows for a little bit of movement in desired directions while resisting movement in other directions and so I decided I was going to employ that same technique in this paintings conservation and so what crazy space-age futuristic material am I going to be using for my membrane felt yeah felt no I am not kidding wool felt now I'm using wool felt as opposed to an acrylic or synthetic product because wool is impervious to hydrocarbon chemicals and the solvents that use those chemicals unlike acrylics or synthetics it's not going to melt it's also impervious to heat it's not going to melt or compress to a degree where it's unusable when it gets heated up and on top of that the felt manufacturers have pretty specific data and research on the properties of how this felt pacts that is they know the shear strength they know the peel strength and that's all really important in deciding which felt is appropriate for this project and so how is this uncoupling membrane gonna actually work and how is it going to be a benefits well the felt is going to get permanently bonded to the honeycomb fiberglass panel that's going to be that will not break but on the other side where it gets bonded to the wood panel I'm going to be using a conservation grade reversible adhesive one that's heat and solvent reversible now what it's going to allow is for the wood panel to move a little bit to expand and contract vertically and horizontally just a little bit now we're not talking inches here we're talking fractions of a millimeter but just enough so that any built-up tension that's in the wood will be allowed to dissipate then it won't be held by the wood and potentially cause the wood to burst to check or to pop off of the honeycomb panel and that's because while the felt will allow a little bit of movement in our x axis and the y axis it will not allow movement on the z axis it has an incredibly high peel strength so this wood panel is going to be able to breathe just a little bit but it's not going to distort it's not going to twist or cut or bow or pop off the panel and another benefit is the reversibility because this felt will be accessible from all four edges of the painting a solvent can be injected into this felt or this felt can just be saturated with that Evette solvent and that adhesive bond between the felt and the wood panel will become weakened and release and so what was a potential problem that jeopardized the success of this whole project has now been turned into an opportunity and an asset that is actually going to benefit this project more than if I didn't include it so felt honeycomb panel wood panel let's go so everything starts with the felt and this isn't something that you're going to be able to buy at your local craft store this is ordered directly from the manufacturer and it's a really high quality product this felt is often found in print making blankets because of its resistance to deformation and because of its high compressive value now this is about an eighth of an inch thick but with a really sharp pair of razor edge shears I can cut it with relative ease now I have to heat the adhesive up to make it flow better and to activate it and I'll put it in a non-stick pan which actually believe it or not this adhesive sticks to nonstick surfaces that shows you just how good of an adhesive it is and then I can take a roller and I can apply it to whichever surface I so desire and in this case I'm going to apply it to the wood and I have mixed this adhesive to be a little bit thicker than I normally would use because I want a good thick layer to sit on the surface of this wood panel now I can fin the adhesive down if I want to use it on a canvas and I want it to penetrate through the canvas weave but in this case I want it to sit mostly on the surface I'm not really concerned about it penetrating into the wood pores I really want the adhesive to be on the surface so that when the panel does get bonded there's enough adhesive to make a good bond the next step is to apply that same adhesive to the felt but in this case it comes as a film and so I can cut the film and peel off the nonstick layer and then I can transfer it over to the felt and I can apply it using an iron now again I need about 150 degrees to make sure that that adhesive bonds to whatever it's touching and so I'll set my iron and I will start to adhere this film down and I'm going to start in the center and work out towards the edges so that I don't get any ripples much like you would when you're stretching a painting it's important that I don't get any ripples because those could manifest themselves through whatever I'm mounting to this substrate now in this case it's a wood panel so they're probably not going to manifest themselves through the wood panel but in the case of cane this that's a possibility now I'm using a little steel weight behind the iron to help cool and keep it flat while it cools if I don't do this what ends up happening is ripples and waves will form as the film cooled so this is just a little trick that I've picked up over many many years of working with this product and it just saves me a little time and make sure that the surface is as smooth and flat as possible which is something that I'm going for now with the adhesive applied to both the wood panel and the wool felt I can assemble those two and transfer them over to the hot table and I'll bring the hot table up to about a hundred and fifty degrees and once it is at temperature I can turn the heat off turn the vacuum pump on allow it to cool and expel any of the excess air from that mylar pocket it's really important that this adhesive reaches a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit so that it can activate and reach its full adhesion properties anything less and it just won't be as strong and anything more and it will start to break down and it won't be as strong now once it is fully cured and cool it is an incredibly strong bond not one that I would be able to break with my hand now generally when I use the hot table I try to recycle as much of this film as possible and this piece of film has been around the block a couple of times so it's just time to retire it atop the painting I had applied a piece of silicone eyes mylar just so that anything that was on the mylar film that I just peeled off wouldn't stick to the painting and below the painting I also put a release piece of paper just so that the wool wouldn't stick to anything on the table I just want to make sure that it's clean and there's no impediments to getting a perfect product and now I can walk over to my table and I can start trimming off the excess felt I cut a larger piece of felt that I needed so that I had a little bit more wiggle room when I was putting this all together it's always easier to have more material and trim the excess off than it is to try to align irregular shapes and fluid materials on the first go-round now this isn't particularly difficult I'm just using an incredibly sharp blade and running it across and I want to remove all this excess felt because I want this to be crisp and clean I don't want this to be visible and I don't want it to get in the way of framing or the next steps when I mount this whole thing to the honeycomb panel so unfortunately can't save these little scraps but they are serving a larger purpose now to bond this fiberglass honeycomb panel to the wood and felt assembly I'm using that same two-part epoxy adhesive that I use to create the honeycomb panel and I'm using this because it has excellent adhesion to fiberglass it is pretty easy to work with it is incredibly strong and once it is cured it is an inert now I don't need this part to be reversible because the inclusion of that felt layer will facilitate the injection of a solvent that will soften up the adhesive that I use to bond the felt to the wood panel so this part can be completely permanent because if it ever needs to be taken apart this honeycomb panel will likely be discarded now I'm using a 1/8 inch v-notched trowel to spread this adhesive and that's actually a pretty important step because if I just used a putty knife or a flat trowel I would probably get high spots and low spots and an uneven distribution of adhesive and that could compromise the overall bond once it's cured but by using a V notched trowel I can ensure that the dispersion of this adhesive is even across the entire surface now once I have the adhesive over the entire panel I can place the wooden felt assembly onto it and as you'll notice I can place it in the wrong position well this panel is not quite square and the honeycomb panel is so it takes a little bit of finesse to get everything just right and that's another reason why I like using a slow cure adhesive if this were a rapid cure adhesive I might not be able to lift this up and reset it into the proper position but once I have it where I want it I'll apply a little bit of hand pressure just to make sure that there is the beginnings of a good bond this is not what is going to ensure a very strong bond but I just want to make sure that when I'm moving it it's not going to slide around or or move at all now I can take it over to the hot table and I can use the vacuum pump to apply even pressure downward on the painting so that we have a really good buck the vacuum pump is pretty simple in that there are holes in the corners of the table and the cotton webbing that you see running from those holes around the painting allows the air to be sucked out of this envelope that I'm creating with mylar and tape now you might notice something down there in the right-hand corner well that's not a cat it's not a sasquatch it's my son who was with me during the filming of most of this project and he makes several cameos that by now I'm sure you are all too familiar with he's a great helper by the way so once everything is where it should be I can turn the vacuum pump on and I can extract all of the air and that will ensure that I have good even pressure across this whole panel and that's going to make sure that the bond is really good I'm also going to add a little bit of heat just to speed up the curing time and also a little bit of heat helps the adhesive with its flow it gets a little less stiff when it's warm and now with the Assembly of the honeycomb felt and would all complete I can start to remove this facing and if we remember this facing is a washy kozo that was adhered with a fish gelatin and washy kozo is a Japanese mulberry paper and mulberry paper is significantly stronger than tissue paper or even regular wood paper pulp and it provides the perfect material to face and protect this painting removing it starts with some warm water and application on the surface and once that warm water is allowed to saturate the paper and penetrate through to the adhesive it will soften that fish gelatin adhesive and once softened it will release its adhesion and then I can start to peel back these large sheets now this is a significantly thicker piece of kozo than I normally use because I wanted an extra layer of protection and some structural integrity when I was handling this painting now because it's so thick it comes off in large sheets which is really a benefit to me it speeds up the process of removal and it requires less water and less labor on the painting and you know I've said it before and I will say it again in fact I'll say it ad nauseam that it kind of breaks my heart to have to use this beautiful material this beautiful paper in such a destructive way now obviously it's the perfect material for my needs here but it's not designed or made for conservation in fact washi kozo or Japanese mulberry paper is generally made for creative purposes calligraphy screen making Sumi ink painting or even watercolor painting and if it breaks your heart too to see me destroy this really beautiful paper maybe you'd like to try your hand out at creating something with it and the first step is to head over to Skillshare the online learning community for creatives where millions of people come together to take the next step in their creative journey and if you're at a loss for where to start I'd like to suggest a class by cat Coco let watercolor techniques exploring skills to create on-trend paintings but maybe watercolor isn't your thing maybe it's photography or animation or marketing whatever it is Skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes for creative and more importantly curious people the first 1,000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a two-month free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity now without a doubt one of my favorite parts of any conservation process is cleaning the paintings because this is where I finally get to see lies beneath all of this dirt and grime old varnish and old retouching and this has been a long time coming I mean we are on Episode four of five generally the cleaning happens early on but because of all the structural issues I had to delay this process until now and I'm gonna start by using a detergent paste and an enzyme cleaner to remove any of the surface grime now this painting may not be tremendously grimy it may not have a lot of cigarette smoke or dust and dirt or soot from fireplaces or oil burning furnaces but removing all of this accumulated surface crime is absolutely essential because if I don't do that it's going to be harder for these solvents that I'm gonna be using to get access to the varnish layer and that could potentially lead me to using an overly aggressive solvent so this two-part cleaning process is super important it's also important because if I ever just wanted to take the surface grime off and leave the old varnish if that's what the client wanted I can do so using those surface grime removing detergents but in this case the client wants everything gone the grime the varnish the old retouching so I'm going to start off with a very mild solvent mixture and I start off with a very mild solvent mixture because I want to make sure that I'm not going to use anything that's too aggressive or potentially damaging on this painting now I've made tests along the edges I always do that as a first step when I'm assessing this painting and that was done way before any work started and so I have my notes and I can refer back to the solvent mixtures that I use that were successful in removing the varnish now you can see here the varnish is coming off fairly easily and with it some old retouching now this is a case where it appears that the retouching was executed atop and old varnish which isn't necessarily a bad thing it definitely makes sure that the old retouching can be removed one of the unfortunate things is that if the retouching was done well and the old varnish is a natural resin varnish it's going to darken and discolor and then by removing it all of the old retouching will come off and there are times when the retouching is good enough that I don't have to remove it but unfortunately in this case it's going to come off one way or the other because we are removing the old varnish and I just smelled it because I just wanted to check to see if the varnish was coming off and sometimes using all of your senses can be of great benefit now as I move over to the area of white or what I expect to be white it's a good barometer to see how much is on the painting and how much needs to come off obviously working in the area of the coat the black area or the brown or the green of the drapes in the background it's a little harder to determine what the true color is but here in the collar we know that it's going to be a white gray cool maybe a little bit warm but it's definitely not going to be yellow and sure enough it's not yellow it's a beautiful light gray white but there's a lot of surface grime and varnish on here this is again one of those cases where it appears that the varnish was applied over some old surface grime maybe even some old varnish I guess the painting just was never properly cleaned and so all of that stuff that's stuck in the texture of the paint in the little valleys of the impasto all that little brown stuff eventually has to come off and that may necessitate using a stronger solvents or mechanical means but for now I'm using a fairly mild solvent just to lift off this varnish but you can still see that a lot of the old retouching is coming off which I have mixed feelings about because the painting as you remember from the introduction didn't look that bad when looking at it from the front I was mostly concerned about the back and the structural issues that it presented well I may have spoken too soon because this painting is completely over painted I mean head-to-toe tail to tip just about every surface of this painting has been glazed in and over painted and what I mean by glazed in and over painted is that at some point somebody took an oil paint thinned it out and started effectively repainting this painting going over areas and applying thin layers of paint to build up or unify the image and really there's only one reason why that may have been done and that's because the image wasn't whole and there's only one reason why that would be the case and that's because somebody was overly aggressive and skinned the painting and skinning is a term that conservators used to describe when a painting is overly cleaned and the top layer of the paint is removed as effectively the painting is skinned off and as I'm working on this face we can start to see some of what I was talking about you can see dark areas where the over paint is still adhered to the original paint layer and some of that dark stuff is actually old adhesive now the good news is that the painting underneath all of this looks really pretty it's a really bright painting and we can see the flesh tones start to come out but as I start to clean this painting and as I move down throughout the face and as I reveal more and more of what lies beneath all of this cover-up work well it's not surprising if we consider what the back of the painting looked like and all of the shoddy sloppy work that was on the back it should come as no surprise that the front of the painting suffers the same fate I was hopeful perhaps a little bit naive or Pollyannish that wouldn't be the case I'm always hopeful that the best-case scenario is going to present itself but I've been doing this long enough that I'm not terribly surprised when that's not the case now I did examine this painting under black light and oftentimes a black light will reveal old retouching but not always because if there's a thick enough layer of discoloured varnish and the over paint is old enough sometimes that black light can't penetrate through the varnish layer and sometimes that old over paint doesn't fluoresce as much as new over paint and so sometimes you just can't really get a good read on how much over paint there is in addition if the entire painting has effectively been glazed in and there is more areas of over paint than not well you may not have anything to compare it to and so you may not realize just how bad it is until you realize just how bad it is now ultimately I'm not scared by this I've encountered paintings that are much worse I'm just a little bit bummed or a little bit disappointed again I had high hopes that this painting wasn't going to require a lot of retouching but it looks like it will you can see that areas throughout the face have been overly cleaned scrubbed abraded and you can see some of the under ground or even the wood starting to show through actually this painting looks like the the ground layer was incredibly thin not very built up and not a lot of ground so some of the original paint and the ground were completely removed revealing just the bare wood now again the one thing here that I can take away that is positive is that the painting or what's left of the painting really is quite stunning and the artist was really talented there's a beautiful array of colors the transitions and the volume that was created with the colors is really quite skillful and that's what makes me excited that I get to work to get the painting back to that state it's just kind of a bummer that so much of the original painting is missing now I'm going to continue to work slowly throughout this face and take extra caution to use an extra mild solvent because this is the most important part of the of the painting and I don't want to run risk that I remove any of the original paint and the solvent that I'm using is incredibly mild and you can see it really takes a lot of effort for me to remove this old varnish because the solvent just isn't cutting through it as fast as a very aggressive solvent would so close up on the eye and you can start to see some of the discolored old oil paint and that's one of the reasons we don't use oil paint when we retouch because it oxidizes it cross-links and over time it darkens and so what looked good when it was originally applied well now it's too dark and it doesn't look good and the oil paint is difficult to remove luckily in this case and much of it is on top of the varnish but some of it probably from a previous previous previous conservation attempt is on the original paint layer itself and so I'll have to make a determination as to how much of that I can safely remove sometimes it's all of it sometimes it's none of it and we just have to retouch over the existing oil paint now in addition there are areas of adhesive from previous repairs that were just left on the surface of the painting and I can use a scalpel to peel these areas up I could use solvent but I don't want to run the risk of doing any damage to the painting and if this is a water-based adhesive I don't want to run risk that the wood absorbs any unnecessary moisture and starts to swell so I can just take my scalpel and I can start to shave it off and remove any of this old adhesive that frankly should have been removed when the previous repair was executed but again I'm not really all that surprised wasn't many of these repairs that this painting suffered were clearly clearly poorly done and this is just another indicator of that sloppy work now anytime you take a scalpel or a blade to the surface of a painting it has to be really really careful because the blade is sharp and you don't want a gouge or Nick or scrape off any of the original paint and so that's why I'm using a fairly dull blade here is not a brand new blade that is razor or scalpel sharp it's been dulled down a little bit on a whetstone so that it has just enough sharpness to get underneath this adhesive but not so much that it's gonna slice or scrape off any of the original paint layer sometimes even dull tools have a place in in your working so it's important to know which tool to use to get the best results and so I'll continue to work on cleaning the painting and removing all this old adhesive till I have it down to a state where I feel like it's completely cleaned and it's ready for the retouching and here's the thing this painting was really abused during the past's interventions there was a lot of over painting and the painting was skinned and you can see just how bad it is right now all of those light spots well that's bare wood where the original paint was removed during a heavy-handed cleaning attempt and so it's pretty clear that I have a lot of work ahead of me and stay tuned because next time you'll get to see me put this painting back together

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 813,925

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

Id: l-FzHPnnyko

Length: 32min 56sec (1976 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020