SIOLIM 35TH SAO JOAO BOAT FESTIVAL 24/06/25

Hi everybody, welcome back to the studio. This is where you left me last week. I was removing all the glue residue from the back of the canvas of the young master and I am almost finished with it. It's been a bit of a slow process but one that was necessary to do. Thanks for all your comments and all your suggestions, that's been great to read through. I've really enjoyed going through those this week and seeing what everyone's been saying about the canvas and the portrait and the history of the picture. So that's been really good to go through. This week we're going to be relining the canvas and removing that facing and we'll also do a little bit of research into the portraits as well. First things first though, this is a very unglamorous restoration job so cleaning the back of the canvas. I'm going to reline this canvas, it's in quite poor condition, it's quite brittle, there's quite a lot of rips and tears on here. So I'm going to remove this old glue residue. So to do this I'm just using a water solution, I apply it, I allow the glue to swell and soften and then once it's softened I can just use a little spatula to scrape off gently the glue from the top of the canvas. You have to be quite methodical with this. If you try and do a large section at once the glue just dries again. So I usually do a two or three inch square section at a time and then the glue will just be at the right consistency to remove. As you can see it is filthy, dirty, a bit of a disgusting job really. But it's necessary to prepare it for the next stage. I imagine this would have been possibly a rabbit skin glue or something similar or their own mixture. It's quite lightly applied and it removes quite easily. It's just one of those jobs where you just have to sit down and knuckle down and tackle it. And it is quite satisfying when you actually see the area of canvas that you've cleaned afterwards. It is quite satisfying to know that you're doing the best you can for that painting. So not too much more to do now. There's the blue dye from what most people thought were grain sacks or flower sacks. So that old lining that was attached a lot of people thought it was grain sacks. If you do google those they do show up as quite similar to what I removed. This patch however is not. This is something a lot thicker. And if Mr Williamson's been involved he's used his nuclear proof glue again. And this is quite hard going. I've tried a number of different solvents to soften this and nothing really worked. So I just had to carefully manually remove that with my spatula. So again quite time consuming, quite careful. And again just scraping off that glue. This patch on this side is slightly different but still quite stubborn as well. So it's a thinner, it might still be a little bit of that original lining. But yeah again well attached, quite difficult to remove. Right as you can see we have took that lining off now and cleaned all that glue residue off. Hours of work. But I'm going to reline this canvas because there's multiple tears and areas of weakness there that you can see. So it's worth taking all that glue residue off and freshening up the back of the canvas. I do think it's quite brittle so another good reason to reline it as well. So I'm going to let that dry now, see how it looks once it's dried and then we will look at relining. And I think we'll probably go with a traditional reline. So yeah that will be the next thing we do with the young master. Okay let's carry on. So whoever had relined the younger master back in the day, whether they did use that linen grain sack or if it was a linen bed sheet, they certainly weren't shy of using a tack. There's so many. If you can see here they're spaced about an inch apart or inch and a half apart. There's just so many of them. So to take them out I just use my chisel. I'll get the stretcher on the edge of the bench. You could clamp this to the bench for a little bit more security. Again time consuming process. Some of the heads snap off. Some of them get stuck in the stretcher but necessary because when you reattach in the new lining you don't want to be hitting a tack when you start attaching it. So they do all need to come out. But this gave me an idea. So a competition idea. If you can tell me how many tacks are here. If you head over to Patreon and send me a message and let me know how many you think there are. First three correct entries will receive some free merch or a freebie. So head over to Patreon. We've got loads of videos on there. Exclusive content behind the scenes. You can support the channel. And yeah but look at all those tack holes there. One, two, three, four, five, six. God there's loads. Anyway I'll give you a clue. There's more than 40. So yeah if you want to take part in that competition head over to Patreon and let me know how many tacks you think there are. Okay so once I've got all the tacks out I need to recalibrate the stretcher. So I just need to take that apart. And it's quite an unusual design this one. Not one that I've really seen before. They've kind of cut these wedges out of the insert bits. And this kind of feeds into my theory that whoever did this painting maybe was not a professional artist. They've made their own stretcher from their own design. I do see some like this but not very common. That insert slides through and then the corner wedges push out. These are quite thick and chunky. I've got a few mismatched ones as well that I'm going to have to replace. But yeah a bit of an unusual design there. And again I don't think it's professionally made. The timber's good but just that method is a little bit unusual. So once I've kind of pulled it all apart, removed any broken or loose stretcher keys I need to put it back together and just make sure it's all nice and square before I attach my liner. So to do this I just measure corner to corner and make sure that both measurements are roughly the same, within a millimetre or so, a couple of mil. And then to keep that in place I'm going to put the stretch keys back in place first just to give it a little bit more security. So here I'm raiding my bowls of collected keys and fixings so if there's ever any spares or bits of stuff that I've got lying around I tend not to chuck things away, much to the detriment of the studio tidiness. But occasionally you'll find a nice vintage key in there or something that will serve a purpose. So I've got various different sizes in there. If I don't find one that's the right size or there is nothing suitable I have a stock of keys that I can go to as well. So these manufactured modern keys, I've had these for 10 years or more. I bought some equipment off a restorer who was retiring and he had bags and bags of these. So this is all I've got left so I probably do need to start manufacturing some more of these replacements. So yeah, once I've got my replacement keys I'm going to put those back into place. These ones, because they are more handmade, it looks like they go in only a certain slot. They're quite thick. So once they're just gently in place I'm not whacking them in by any means, I'm just getting them in there to hold that shape. I'll just check that I've not nudged it. Sometimes you have a tendency just to be slightly out. If it is slightly out, whichever way is the greater, you just move it the opposite direction to get it square again. Believe me, just doing this now and taking a bit of time saves a lot of pain further down the line. If you didn't do this and didn't check and then come to stretch your canvas once it's been relined and your stretcher isn't square, you will be upset because you will have to pull it all apart and start again. So to keep that square and in place I'm just going to tack a small nail or tack in each corner just to stop it moving on an angle. So I'm just going to put these in now and it will just keep that stretcher nice and square. And then as I'm going to be doing a wax resin reline, to keep the back nice and tidy I'm going to apply what I refer to as a dummy liner or a support liner or an extra liner. These can be used for a number of different reasons. It can offer support to a painting from the reverse of the stretcher or in this case it will hide the wax resin finish from the back of the stretcher and will have this nice linen finish. I'm at the end of the roll though and this looks tight. Unfortunately I'm short on my lining fabric so I'm going to have a bit of a dig around. If not, it will be a store visit to get some. That's a shame. Just cracking on there. So down to Abercown's. This is Manchester's best fabric supplier. It's in Oldham Street in Manchester and I've been going here for years. They're great for off cuts of fabric when you don't want to buy full rolls. So yeah, quick pit stop here and back to the studio. Here's the nice piece of linen look that I'm going to use. So as mentioned this is not offering any support to the painting other than tidying up the back finish so I'll just be attaching this to the stretcher. I'll be using staples to do this. It's quick and it's easy and it's just holding this fabric in place and then when I come to tack on the actual lined canvas it won't be hitting anything too solid when the tacks penetrate into the stretcher. And while I continue to wrestle with this I'll show you some research I've been doing on the Young Master. Something I've been enjoying doing lately is a quick Google image search on paintings. So I did the Young Master and you can see all these little paintings that came up very similar kind of style and age. And then this portrait popped up in my feed which I couldn't recreate in the screen recording of this young man. And something about his face and his hair just seemed to ring true with our little boy. The artist was Gilbert Baldry as you've just seen then. And I don't know, I looked at some of his other images. He seemed to be good at faces but then not so good in the clothing and garments. So if you look at the shoes here very similar and the garment those folds and creases aren't particularly good. So I went to my Portrait Painter's Bible and had a bit of a flick through to see if I could find Gilbert Baldry. I did find some Baldry's as you can see here. So Harry 1887 to 1890, John Baldry 1775, John Kirby Baldry 1754 and Alfred Baldry 1858. That's the closest. But no Gilbert Baldry unfortunately. So I went back online and did a little bit of a Google. So when you do type him in there's not an awful lot that comes up. So here's that portrait of a young boy in a red coat. So again good face, poor clothing. What have we got here? Victorian born noted British portrait painter in Ireland. Well he's not that noted because I can only find five examples of his work when I go on to Art UK. So if you click on here this is a good resource for all pictures that are in public collections. So here's a nice portrait of a gentleman. The first Baron of Wavertree and one, two, three, four, five, six. That's all that I've found apart from the young master. So good face, scruffy clothing, very loosely painted clothing. Here's another little one here. Oh here's the girl again. Look how loosely that clothing is painted and a little bit amateur if I'm honest. And the same in this little portrait here. There's something awkward about the poses of these two children as well but that landscape's fantastic. I mean he could paint but maybe portraits weren't his mainstay or his forte. I don't know if the ages are correct but it did lead me down this rabbit hole and I did wonder somebody who's maybe not the best at portraits but did do portraits, maybe he could be responsible for our young master. I suppose we won't really know but looking at him and looking at the garment and the way we've got that, I don't know, contrast between a well-executed face and poor garmentry and then a decent landscape in the background, there could be something in it. So if any of you guys want to have a bit more of a google about Gilbert Baldry, I couldn't find anything on his family tree. I did find quite a lot of Baldry's, some really interesting characters out there but nothing on Gilbert. So if any of you want to put on your sleuth hats, get out your magnifying lenses, then please have a look and let me know in the comments. Thank you. So for the waxery line I'm going to be putting him onto a really heavyweight cotton canvas. This is a 12 ounce canvas so it's going to give it lots of stability because you can see how fragile or how thin the original canvas is. We know it's had a glue paste lining with the rabbit skin glue that can also make things brittle especially if there's been kind of things feeding on it over time. So I just mark the outline of my painting onto the canvas just roughly and this just gives me an idea of where I'll be applying the wax when I put the wax resin mixture on. George, who taught me how to do this method, would just stand above it with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Senior service, no filter, stick in one hand, just a pencil going all the way around in the other. Just years of experience and I was like, do you not need a ruler? Do you not need to measure that out? Why aren't you being more precise? But for this part of the procedure you can be a little bit loose in terms of marking out. So that's my canvas roll, nice big heavy roll, that's going to keep me going for a while. Not like my lining fabric which has gone. I'm trying really hard to keep the studio tidy at the moment so every time I look at these shots I'm looking at things that need tidying or look out of place. So hopefully you'll see things looking a little bit straighter soon. This is my crockpot with my wax resin mixture in. So we've got beeswax in there, rosin, a little bit of turpentine and a few secret ingredients that I will not divulge. Before I line I took a picture of that stamp. A lot of people commented that it said India rubber canvas at the bottom and I think it was around 1835 that they started using rubber in the compound of their canvas production and their pre-made canvases in the ground layer. So there's no inscription on the back of here. That stamp has been photographed and I can attach that to the back of the painting afterwards so I'm not concerned about losing that. And then I just apply very thinly our wax resin mixture. So quite methodical in the way that I do this. I go across and then down and then across and then down like a patchwork so this way that I kind of know that I pretty much cover everything. And once I've got one coat on the actual canvas, if I have missed anything where I've dragged the drying wax over I will just go over that again and just give that a second coat as well. Again this technique, this procedure just takes me back 20 years to when I learned how to do this and was shown and I do enjoy it. I really do enjoy this technique. More recently I have been thinking back to my apprenticeship and what a magical time it was. I would love to go back and do it all again. Most procedures were probably shown to me once or maybe twice and then I was left to get on with it. I can remember I didn't write down all the stages in the relining. I just tried to memorise everything so as not to look, I don't know, stupid or whatever. But yeah, you were pretty much shown once or twice and then you were on with it. If you did get stuck I would, you could go back and ask George again but he was so busy in there. There was pictures being framed, there was pictures being gilded, there was a hell of a lot stuff going on. So you were pretty much left to it in the restoration department. So I'm just securing the corners now for when I move this around so it stays in place. So just a little bit of the mixture on each corner and it will just hold it in place when I come to transfer it to the hot table. Before I put him down I have these sheets of melonex that prevent the wax from adhering to the canvas and blanket and sometimes from the previous life I'm reusing the sheet. I just need to make sure there's no big lumps or wax that's penetrated from a past treatment. I could try and reuse this melonex as much as possible but you probably get three or four linings out of it before you need a new piece. And here's the blanket that I keep promising I will replace and never do. Okay, so I was just about to start relining there and the vacuum pump seems to be not working. So I'm going to pull the table apart and find out what's happening with that pump. Typical, trying to get things done. Sometimes this stuff happens. It has been running for quite a few years without any problems. So I'll just have to take it out and have a look and see what the issue is with it. Typical. The good thing about this table is I built it myself from a design from my first restoration studio so I know how it all works and operates. This is the vacuum pump. So that's the outlet where the air comes out. That's the oil reservoir. It's a heavy piece of kit. I think it's a surplus from World War II or something. I've been using it for 15 years or so. So I will just get this plugged in and see what looks like could be the problem. But the air's coming out of there which is good. That seems to be doing what it should be doing. This is the vacuum sucking. So you can hear that. That's fine. It's quite nice and tight and it's got a good suction on it. So the fault must be elsewhere. So I'll just check the oil level while I'm here. That looks good too. As I say it's a heavy piece of kit. I don't normally pull it apart but to make sure everything else is okay it's worth checking. And I think this is my problem here. These are the hoses that connect and that one seems to have a break in it. So I'll just give that an adjustment. And that's just some of the residue oil from the pump. And that was the problem. The hose had been bent out of shape and I'm getting a good suction on there now. So I will leave that running. I will apply the heat and then come back in a while. And this is it after the wax has been heated. So you can see there that it's melted. The vacuum has attached the original painting to the new canvas liner and it comes off beautifully flat. So this painting is very thin. If it was an impasto painting I wouldn't be doing it this way. I'd be doing it a different way because the vacuum can flatten down impasto paint layers. And then just take this off the table. We've still got our facing paper. Usually if it's not being faced you get to see how well it's turned out straight away. But we're going to have to remove that facing paper to see how it's turned out. But it looks pretty good. I'm quite happy with that. And again, a magical procedure for me. Every time it comes off there it's like Christmas Day. I just love it. And it does just take me back 20 years now to when I first started doing this. So I'm going to remove the facing paper now. So I've got a damp sponge and that's just going to again swell the glue mixture that I used, soften it and then just gently be able to peel away the paper and reveal our young master after his lining treatment. It's like he's trapped under ice at the moment. So you can see there as the the paper, the Japanese mulberry paper softens I'll be able to start removing that and taking it off. So for all of you that enjoyed the Enoch Seaman video, it has been my best video yet with nearly 70,000 views. If there are more peel freaks out there you might enjoy this peeling as well. Slightly different to the varnish one but still satisfying nonetheless. So I'll just leave you in peace while I pick and peel and reveal the young master. There's something so, I don't know, it's almost haunting when I look at those eyes. I really do feel like they are staring back from history at me and he almost has an expression of, I don't know, he needs fixing but I'm glad the mouth's intact and the nose but it's those eyes that just captivate me at the moment. You can see that real terribly applied overpaint to his cheeks there. It's like they hadn't even bothered or maybe it was a good match at the time but the brush strokes are so rough. I'm already starting to think about how I'm going to retouch this portrait. Once he's been cleaned I'll be looking to see how much original paint is left and from what I can see now there isn't going to be an awful lot. We've got his eyes and nose and lips. The cheeks might have a little bit of pigment on there but once that overpaint removes I think we're pretty much going to be down to like pale ground or underpainting. So I'm thinking about methods of retouching. It might be that we do what we did with the Regency Gents where we kind of bridge the gap with small points of pigment and try to save him as much as possible or we may be a little bit more liberal depending on what is left and have to be quite thicker with the paint to build him back up. So I'm already devising a bit of a plan while I'm doing this and in my mind I've got a few ideas of the path we might go down in terms of reconstructing him. The question will arise though of when does it stop being an original work and become a work of the restorer. So whoever has had a go at this, if it is Mr Williamson, someone has really over cleaned him and done the job on him and then they have put some paint back on there. Now I'm not convinced about his gown and his clothes as well. I kind of feel like there might be a lot of overpaint on there as well. I'm not too sure but if it is baldery and he wasn't very good at drapery then this may be original. But however this goes we are going to be looking at quite a bit of extensive retouching in his face just to preserve him. I think it's the anatomy of the clothing as well. So he would have small shoulders but then where that decorative element on his shoulder is that I'm cleaning just now looks too small for me. The head almost looks too big for the body. But the background, when I show you the whole of the background, that looks to be in place and as the original composition. So again there's things to be revealed in this portrait that will only come from the actual cleaning. He is cute though and that portrait by Balder, I wonder if it's just the hairstyle and the full face, the full frontal of the face that's the similarity. I'm not sure. Maybe we'll find a signature, that would be nice. So as I've got some of the facing paper off now I'm just going to saturate the rest of that and try and take it off in as big a chunk as I can. But with the lining procedure that paint is nice and secure on there now there's no risk of any paint coming off because as the wax resin mixture penetrates the ground layer it holds the paint in place from the back. This paper is so sticky though it doesn't really come across in here but as I'm taking bits off it is just sticking to my fingers and I'm at this stage of the restoration now. So he's secure, he's been lined, I know he's going to be good for another 100 to 200 years but now we've got this great mystery of what the painting actually is underneath the paint surface. Part of me wants the hands and the fabric that we're seeing to be original and then nothing's coming off and this is as the artist intended it. He was good at heads and not so good at everything else but then there's another aspect or another part of me that wonders if there is something underneath that paint that has been obscured and is superior to what is on the actual painting that we can see. And when I look at his hands there they don't look very well attended to and then he's got his hand on that is resting on his lap and that's also got strange elements to it as well. So I'm in a real funny situation at the moment, I'm kind of like I don't want to have to all that paint to remove from his gown but I'm also unsure of whether it will or not maybe that is original. So the young master will start to reveal his secrets I'm sure. Okay that's the facing paper off now. I think, oh wait a minute, let's choose cinematic. Oh look at that nice blurry background now. Right that's the facing paper off. I do enjoy doing that and revealing him again. It'd be nice if you revealed him and he was completely finished and went oh wow that's amazing. But no he's still in the same situation that we were before. There's still sections that baffle me. I don't know if the whole gown might be over paint. There's something about the way the head sits in that body that doesn't quite sit right for me. Anyway, right we are going to leave that episode there. It's Wednesday. It's about five o'clock, four o'clock, very grey July, July the 3rd. Happy 4th of July to everybody on the other side of the pond. I hope you have a celebration or you had a lovely celebration by the time you get this. So I hope you have a nice time and I will catch you on the next one. So next week might be a Patreon video. We are working on a beautiful portrait over there that will be getting varnished and I'm also working on a vlog for my Patreon followers. Thanks for all your support. If you're still here and you're still listening please give me a quick like. If you haven't subscribed and hit the bell for notifications you can do that. Other than that I will just keep waffling on until I decide I've got nothing left to say, which is probably about now. Okay guys, thanks for watching. See you on the next one. Have a lovely weekend and I will see you all very soon. Okay, bye guys.