Revealing The Light

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. This painting by the Woodstock Artist Colony painter Henry Mattson clearly needs some work. Aside from being completely covered with some discolored surface coating, the painting is falling apart, tearing from its support. The surface of a painting is highly cracked and very distracting to say nothing of the paint stability issues. The canvas has many little punctures throughout, including in the signature, and several big holes and tears that have been previously attempted to be conserved, although poorly. In addition, there is a wonderfully absurd patch on the front of the painting that needs to be removed. And while all of these issues are pretty clear with the naked eye, when we take a look at the painting under UV, you can see them even more prominently. I'm circling the old overpainting in red. This glows or fluoresces under UV light pretty clearly. This looks very different than the rest of the painting, and all of this has to be removed. But I'm also going to circle some other areas in blue, like here in the bottom corner, that are fluorescing very strangely. This doesn't look like overpainting, but it is. And even up there in the upper right, you can see some of that overpainting underneath the additional overpainting. So hopefully, when all of the structural issues are addressed, the painting is clean, and all of that overpainting and, yes, that patch on the face are removed, we can finally reveal the light. After emigrating from Sweden in 1906 with a mere $13 in his pocket, Mattson discovered painting and started studying under the known Swedish artist John Carlson. Now Carlson's work was light and airy, impressionist and realist, and that's what he taught Mattson. But Mattson wasn't interested in that type of depiction of the natural landscape. He was more interested in capturing what the landscape felt like, and that led him to his most prominent body of work, dark, brooding, and filled with raw emotion. Unlike the painting we have in the studio today, which is much more reminiscent of Carlson's work. This body of work garnered praise, accolades, and awards for Mattson. And to think, all he needed to do was find his own voice. And with Squarespace, you can give your voice a platform. With thousands of beautifully designed templates that work everywhere and anywhere, Squarespace will have you looking good. And with their new fluid design technology, you can drag and drop elements around your website to change things up or customize it as you see fit without the need of any code. But that doesn't mean it's just a pretty website. Under the hood is massive technology, from search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, mailing lists, online scheduling, social media integration, shipping solutions, and more. Pretty much everything you need to run a successful business. So head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Before I can start thinking about how to get rid of that ridiculous patch that's on the face of the painting, I mean, come on. That's not even, I don't even, ugh. I have to separate this painting from its support. And here, the artist used some simple tacks, which is a great relief for me. Nobody's added a thousand staples or duct tape or done anything ridiculous. So removing these tacks should be fairly simple, particularly with my tack pulling tool, which makes quick work of all of these tacks. But this canvas is really brittle, so I want to be careful not to damage the tacking edge. Even though it's not part of the image per se, it's still part of the painting as an object. And if I don't have to lose it, why not? Now, in looking at the back, I can see remnants of many, many layers of paper tape. This is just cheap tape that framers often put on the back of paintings and frames to tidy it up. And this is one of the things that I just absolutely cannot stand. This is a low-quality tape that's filled with low-quality water-based adhesive. And you can see the tape is on the strainer, and it's on the tacking edge as well. And all of that glue has effectively bonded this canvas to the support. So I have to take my palette knife and delicately run in between the canvas and the wood to separate it. This wouldn't be necessary if the framers wouldn't do this. And please, if you're a framer, stop doing this. It's just not helpful. Once the painting is removed, I can see this little patch, and I'm just going to see if I can peel it off. If I don't need to use any complicated materials or tools right now, then that's a bonus to me. And you can see it does come off fairly easily. I still have to be careful not to tear the canvas, but I think this is a really small hole. Yep, tiny little hole, big old patch. I'm going to take a bristle brush and just start loosening up some of this accumulated grime. It's been there for decades, and though it's just dust, it's compressed, and it often sticks to the canvas. Once it's loose, I'll come back with my vacuum and just begin sucking all of this grime up and off of the back. We don't want any of this present. I want to clean the back of the canvas, and the easiest way is by using a vacuum. Once all of that stuff is gone, I can take a solvent gel, and I can start removing the adhesive used to bond this patch down, and break down some of the old oil paint that was used to, well, I guess, patch the painting. On the front, the oil paint was applied on those tears really thick, and it penetrated and oozed through the back, and so I'm breaking it down. While I'm waiting for that gel to work, I'm going to take my scalpel and go across the entire canvas and remove these little slugs and other particulate that's on the back, because when I put painting on the hot table, if these are present, they will create bulges on the face of the painting, and that would be a problem, because they'd be distracting. So this is just a chunk of oil paint that oozed through that tear when somebody tried to, I guess, repair it with oil paint, and this, again, has to go. We need to fix this tear properly, and all of this oil paint is just in the way. So the solvent gel helps soften it, and then the scalpel does quick work of the remnants. After letting the solvent gel sit for a couple of minutes, I can take my scalpel and then scrape off all of this adhesive. Luckily, the solvent gel works. Sometimes it doesn't, and it's much more complicated to remove this adhesive, and it runs risk of damaging the canvas, but in this case, we got lucky, and for that, I am thankful. I'll go and make a second and third pass across the entire canvas, just to make sure that the back is smooth and free of little bumps and other detritus. And then I'll take this canvas over to the hot table for the first treatment, which is going to flatten and relax this canvas. It's going to get rid of any waves, any bumps, any dents, any ripples, any distortions on the planar surface. And we do this now because we want to make sure it's flat going forward during the cleaning process and any other treatments that we may need to do. And you can see, just by handling it, those tacking edges are just coming off. I'll take care to keep them where they are, and I will make sure that I don't lose them in the process of working on this painting. Once it's on the hot table, underneath the mylar envelope, I'll add heat, I'll remove air with the vacuum pump, and now we have good downward pressure. Now the painting can sit. Though the vacuum pressure does a lot to get rid of the cracks, a little roller helps a ton. You can see just how a few passes really smooths out the painting surface, and that makes a big difference when we're looking at it. Once the painting's been brought up to temperature, heat is turned off, it's allowed to cool, and once the painting and the table are cool, I'll turn off the vacuum pressure, I'll peel off the tape that creates the airtight envelope, I'll remove the mylar, and then I will transfer the painting over to the other table where it will rest under weights for a few days. If I skip this step, the painting is just going to distort, and we'll have to do this all over again. So this is really a critical step, and it's one that's fairly simple. Painting on the drywall, a little felt to protect the surface, a couple layers of drywall on top of it, and then a couple of cinder blocks, just passive weights. That's it! After transferring the paper out from under the weights, it became clear to me that these tacking edges were no longer part of the painting. They had all separated, and I want to keep that, and so what I'm going to do is reinforce them with some Japanese paper. But first, I'm going to take a brush, dip it in some water, and paint on some lines on this Japanese paper. I'm not using a pencil, I'm not using a knife, and I'm not using a tape measure because this doesn't have to be terribly precise. Just using some water on this paper. Now this is very thin mulberry paper, and it's really strong, except when it's wet. And you can see that simply painting a line of water allows me to tear this and get a really soft, effectively deckled edge. This is important because that soft edge prevents any transfer of the edge to the front of the painting. I'm going to be using this paper to bond the tacking edges to the canvas, and I don't want to transfer a line to the front of the painting. So I'll go over this paper, oh I don't know, a dozen or so times, and make a little stockpile of little strips of mulberry paper. And once I have enough, I'll take a conservation adhesive that's water-based and removable, but does not shrink when it dries. And that's really important, otherwise it could distort the alignment of the tacking edge. And I'll just paint it on the edges of the canvas, where the tacking edge is separated. And then, when I align everything, I can take my paper, I can set it in that adhesive, and then continue on, making sure that all of the tacking edge is bonded down. I'll go over the surface, making sure that there's enough adhesive, that there is a good bond, and then I'll take some siliconized mylar, some felt, and some weights, and press it, and just let it dry. I'll do this treatment where the tears are as well, because I want to reinforce these. Now, I have decided that this painting does need a lining. It is just too brittle. The tacking edges coming off just proved to me that if I don't do a lining, this painting is probably going to snap into a million pieces, and I don't want that, so a lining it is. Now, after pressing all of the areas where the tears are, and the tacking edges where they've separated, I will transfer the painting back for the application of the adhesive. And you can see I'm doing this on a piece of siliconized mylar, because it is easier to transfer that way. I mentioned this painting was like a cracker. It's so dry, but also the siliconized mylar will prevent the painting from sticking to anything like the cardboard on the table as I apply this adhesive. I'll roll this on and get a nice even thin layer. I don't need a ton, and then I'll let it dry, and then we can start preparing the lining. Now, a lining, a soft lining in this case, really consists of just three materials. You have the new canvas, and here I'm preparing it by removing any slubs. Remember I scraped off all the things from the back of the original canvas to keep it smooth? I'm going to do the same thing here with this lining canvas. And even though the factory does this in Belgium, sometimes they miss little things, or I'm just extra picky, and I want it extra smooth. Once that's done, I can then apply an adhesive film, and this is the second ingredient. And this adhesive film has two release layers. One is paper, which I peeled off, and then the other is siliconized mylar, which is on the surface, and that allows me to iron this on. And I'm ironing it on while following the iron with a weight, and this helps keep the distortion to a minimum. Anytime you add heat to a material that has ambient moisture in it, like fabric, it's going to distort, and so following with the iron prevents that distortion. I'll peel off the siliconized mylar, you saw that just a minute ago, and then I'll add the painting. I'll align it to make sure it's where I want, and then I'll take the siliconized mylar, I'll cover the painting again, and I'll tack it in place just on the tacking edges in the four corners to make sure that it doesn't move during the handling process. It would be unfortunate if the registration slipped and it didn't get lined properly. Then I can transfer it over to the hot It's really simple. We take a piece of cotton webbing and we go around the painting. This provides a path for the air to be sucked out using the vacuum pump, and then we'll put the through-bag connectors, which allow the hoses to go through the mylar. I'll take the mylar down, take it down some more, and some more. I'll put the through-bag connectors on, I'll turn the heat on, I'll suck out the air, and then we have good, solid downward pressure. I'll come back with a piece of felt and just make sure that there are no little air bubbles and we have a little bit more pressure. I'll use a bone folder where necessary to add more pressure. You get the drift here? I want pressure even downward. Then once the table has been up to temperature, I'll turn the heat off, allow it to cool. Once it's cool, I'll remove the mylar, the through-bag connectors, the tape, and all of that stuff, and then the painting is live. It has been successfully bonded down to that new canvas. It's not going to come off unless we apply heat or solvent, and you can see it's really smooth, which is exactly what I want. But now it's time to return this painting to its support, so I'll take it off of the hot table and transfer it to the front of the studio. But before I return the painting to its support, I have to clean it. I almost forgot about that. Now, I made some tests earlier on and determined that there was no varnish on this painting. The artist didn't varnish it. Nobody did in the past. But there is a layer of surface grime, and it's probably nicotine and cigarette smoke and stuff like that. It's very yellowed. So I'm using a neutral organic soap that I mix in the studio, and this soap is safe on the painting surface. It just breaks down all of that grime. I'll use a brush and then I'll use a toothbrush just to make sure I get into all of the texture of the paint, the impasto, and loosen it up. This brush is perfectly safe on the painting surface. I mean, it's perfectly safe for your teeth and your gums, and it's really effective. Once I've removed and loosened up that surface grime, I'll come back with a cotton ball and I'll just lift off the residue. And that's it. That's how I clean this painting. It's not terribly difficult, but as I go through, you can see it makes quite a bit of difference. Removing that layer of yellowed gunk and grime reveals some pinks, some blues, some greens, some really beautiful colors. And I think this painting is one that is really delicate. It's about all of those subtle colors. The artist chose this palette deliberately, and we should be able to see it. That's what he wanted us to do. So I'll continue working, applying this soap, and then removing it with the toothbrush and then the cotton ball. And you'll notice that I'm working not in a grid. I'm following the contours of the painting. Now, because there is no varnish underneath this surface grime, I want to be extra careful to make sure that I don't use a grid for fear that the soap could etch the surface of the painting or leave a tide line. Now, this soap is safe for this painting. I've made those tests, but I like a belt and suspenders approach. Just a little bit of extra insurance, because I don't want to do anything that could potentially harm this painting. Even if I don't think it's going to happen, there's no reason for me not to take those precautions. Every time you get into a car, you don't think that you're going to get into an accident, but you still put your seat belt on just in case. Makes sense, right? So I'll continue for the rest of the painting, just working to remove all of this grime. And I'll leave the signature for last. That's something that I do as practice, because you just never know with a signature. And you want to make sure that you have as much information as possible about how the paint layer reacts to the treatments that you're doing, the cleaning, the detergents, before you go onto the signature. And once you have all that information and you're confident, then you can go ahead and clean the signature. I'll make a few passes with a light solvent to remove any residues from that soap, and then I can start cleaning off all of the other things that are on the surface. All of the retouching, and yeah, that patch. So I'll apply a solvent gel onto the surface where the retouching is, and agitate it with a brush, and then lift up all of that oil paint with a solvent on the swab. I'll have to do this a couple of times, because once the solvent gel is saturated with oil paint, it's no longer very effective. And then I'm going to come back with some of my neutral organic soap and clean off all of whatever is on the painting that was never cleaned off when they retouched it. And you can see, with a couple of passes of the brush, it's all gone. That's what we want. Now I'll do this on this other area where, I don't know, there's something fishy going on. I mentioned earlier that there was some blue paint. Well, I can see the blue paint, and I think it was because there was some staining on the painting, and they tried to overpaint it. In any event, I get all of that staining off, but the blue paint still remains. So I'm going to come with my scalpel and just chip it off. Sometimes we use solvent gels because they're effective, and sometimes we have to use manual techniques because they're effective. It's no better or worse, it's just what is the best for the painting, the safest, and the most effective. And in this case, scraping was the most effective. So that's the damage that they tried to cover up. I can fix that. And finally, the thing that I've been waiting for since I saw this painting, this silly little patch on the face. So just like previously, I'm going to apply the solvent gel to break down the old oil paint, retouching, and then I'll come back with the swab and I'll clean it off. And then, because I'm impatient, I'm going to go right with my scalpel and start chipping and scraping off this patch. This is just so absurd and ridiculous. I mean, the back of the painting, I get it why people put patches on the back, but the front? I have no words. So more solvent gel to remove any adhesive and any more paint that's on there, another swab to clean it off, and then the neutral organic soap to clean off all the grime that was left on there when they applied this patch. And now we have a beautiful little hole that I will have to contend with and fix. But trust me, I'll do a better job. Now all of this other blue paint, well, that's also retouching or overpainting, and I'm going to remove it just like I did the previous blue paint with my scalpel, just chipping and scraping it off. And what I find is that there's a little bit of damage, but nothing that would warrant this kind of overpaint. Silly actions indeed. And now it's time to return the painting to its support. It's all cleaned, it's all ready for fill-in and retouching, and now it's ready for stretching. I mentioned that this is a strainer. The client didn't want to replace this with a proper stretcher. Sometimes I can encourage my clients to do things, and sometimes they tell me no. And then I encourage them again, and sometimes they relent, and sometimes they stick to their guns and say no. Every client has their own needs, and while I might be an expert in painting conservation, they're an expert in what they want, and I have to respect their wishes. Now, again, I can encourage them to do one thing or another, or not do one thing or another, but ultimately, when you work for private clients, you have to understand that they are participants in this process, and you have to respect their wishes and their needs. Now, I certainly wouldn't do something that's foolish or dangerous for the painting, but in this case, the client wanted to keep the original support, and so we're keeping the original support. Once the painting has been tacked down, I'll trim off all of the extra canvas. I don't need any of this stuff, and it just gets in the way, and then I can start tidying up the back. Again, I'll slice this canvas a little bit smaller because there's just too much of it. It's always easier to have extra canvas and clean it up later than to try to make it perfect on the first go-around. And then some smaller tacks, and I'll fold over the back of the canvas and tack it in place. I'm not going to use adhesive or tape or glue or staples. I like tacks. That's how it's going to get done in my studio. Fight me. I mean, don't. Really, honestly, don't. If a client really, really wanted me to use something else, we'd probably have a discussion about it, and I'd encourage them to use tacks, but if they said, absolutely not, it has to be staples, well, then I would use staples. The client isn't always right, but, you know, you gotta respect them. So I'll tuck and tidy up these edges. This is a non-negotiable. I will always do this, regardless of what a client wants. This is something that I feel strongly about. And then I can start filling in the losses. There's not a lot of impasto on this painting, not much texture, so I don't need to add much with a brush or other tools. I just need to fill in the losses so that there's something that I can apply the retouching paint to. Not a ton of losses here, which is great for me, because lately I've been doing paintings that have massive losses, and it's exhausting. But there are losses, and so I'll fill in those losses with putty, let it dry, and then start removing the excess. And you'll notice that I am using saliva here. Conservators use saliva all the time for any number of things. We make tests with it, it's viscous, it's generally pH neutral if you're healthy, and it has enzymes that will help break down surface grime. It's also readily available, and why not use it? Now on a massive painting, I'd probably go dehydrated, so I would use some water, but for a little painting like this, saliva is fine. Now before I apply any retouching, I'm going to apply a varnish layer onto this painting. This is going to make the colors look really good, and make them look how they will when the painting is delivered to the client, and that will help me retouch accordingly. This is a synthetic resin varnish with a plasticizer and a ultraviolet inhibitor in it, which means that it's not going to crack or get yellow like old natural resins do. Now maybe in seven or eight hundred years it will, but I mean, let's be realistic. If it lasts a hundred years, that's phenomenal. Natural resin varnishes generally start to yellow within about a month or so of application, and then they can become brittle and break down. Now as the varnish is drying and the solvent is evaporating, I'm going to brush it out, and take note of how the sheen changes, how it goes from super shiny to, well, more satiny, an eggshell. You see that? That's an effect that I really want, and it looks great. Trust me on that one. And now it's on to retouching. Now you'd think that a little spot like this, it's just whites, is really easy, but look at how many color changes I need to make to get this white accurate. There's white, there's pink, there's yellow, there's blue, there's a little bit of green, a little bit of brown, a little bit of black. It takes a lot of passes for something that's so simple. And then I'll paint in a couple little cracks just to help your eye follow through and make sure that it doesn't stand out as looking too good, because that can happen. Now the same thing here. This is just a little white cloud, a happy little cloud, but there is a lot of color in here, and so I have to make a bunch of passes. I'll start off with a base color, and then I'll come in and change it. I'll make it more pink, more yellow, darker, lighter, cooler, warmer, all of those things, until it looks really good. And again, surprisingly, this takes a lot of time. Even a little tear like this, a little hole, can be really involved. Sometimes it goes really easily, and sometimes it fights you every inch of the way. This one isn't really fighting me, but it's just taking a lot of time to get this to disappear. I have to change the direction of my brushwork, I have to change the color, and then once I'm happy with the color, I can start coming in with some darker color and adding some little, I guess, dirt and lines, because those exist in the painting, in the other parts, and I want this to match. Sometimes if the retouching is too perfect, too clean, it stands out just like if it's not good enough. So it's this delicate balance of making it perfect and then, you know, roughing it up a little bit so that it matches the age on the painting. And here with the signature, even though I know it's an A, I'm not going to recreate the A, because that's an ethical line that I don't want to cross. When this painting is examined under UV light, if that A fluoresces, that could be problematic for a seller. And so here's the painting, all finished, all cleaned, all put back together. It's really quite beautiful. The tacking edges have been preserved and saved. The lining has made sure that the brittle canvas is stable. All of those cracks that were really present in the beginning have been flattened. They're no longer distractions. The big stain and all of the overpaint is gone, and the face patch that was so visible has also been removed. The losses on the bottom where the signature was are no longer visible, and the tear and the hole have magically disappeared. And we can now see the painting as a whole without seeing any of those distractions. This wasn't the most involved project I've done by far, but you can see that even with a little bit of care and attention, the transformation is pretty radical. It's no longer dark and dingy. It's bright and full of life.