The Lady of the Manor Part 2

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. As we look back from once we came, I was remarking to a client that portraits of women are so much more desirable than portraits of men, if for one simple reason. Men generally wear white shirt and black suit, whereas women get the luxury or burden of expressing themselves through their couture. And this portrait is no exception. Her clothing is stunning. And that got me wondering about what she was wearing, and it got me thinking about how one would make that clothing. And then I remembered Skillshare. Specifically, Hand Sewing Basics, Make and Bernadette is uniquely situated as a clothing historian and craftswoman herself to introduce you to hand sewing. Whether you're a pro and just want some refreshers or completely new, she'll walk you through some basic steps of getting started, some stitching techniques, the essentials, and give you all of her tips and tricks to make sure that wherever you go, you are well prepared for whatever you encounter. Bernadette is just one of thousands of experts on Skillshare who are ready to share their craft with you. The first 1000 people to use the link in the description will get a free one month trial of Skillshare, so you can find what fascinates you. When we last saw this painting, I was working to remove all of the fill in medium from the canvas. And with it all gone, I can now begin putting it back. I'm using a more flexible, more easily removed fill in medium than what was previously used. And once I have a little bit on my palette knife, I can go ahead and just fill in these areas of missing paint. This is a critical step because I can't simply apply paint where there is no surface. In addition, if I was somehow able to apply the paint, well, we would see a divot. So this putty allows me to mimic the texture of the painting, whether it is a heavy impasto full of brushwork or really smooth like this painting. And because this is easily removed, I can overfill quite extensively and worry about removing the residues later on. Now, because this painting is devoid of impasto and very, very smooth, filling it in is a little bit easier. I don't need a whole bunch of tools to mimic texture, but there is a lot of area to fill in. This painting was flaking and had a lot of losses. Now the paint is all stable, but each and every one of those areas of loss needs to be filled in before I can do any retouching. And once the fill in has been allowed to dry, I can now begin removing it. Now here, I'm going to be using a piece of felt dipped into water to remove the excess fill in. Now, this technique doesn't work for impastoed paintings or paintings where I need a canvas texture on the fill in. But because this painting is very smooth, almost completely smooth, I can run over the entirety of the area of fill in with this piece of felt and lift off the excess. This felt isn't going to go into the areas of fill in and lift it out of the divots. It's just going to pull it off of the surface. And this is a trick that I grabbed from an old master plasterer as he worked to feather out a patch in an old home of mine. Now, even though it's effective, I still have to come back with a small swab and remove some of the excess that I wasn't able to get off with the felt. I use the felt because it is a very quick and very efficient way of removing a lot of excess material. Having to use these little swabs would be very arduous and fundamentally not any better. Once I have removed all of the excess and I'm satisfied with the fill in, I'll come back with a little bit of solvent and just clean off the residues. And just right away we can see how different this painting looks from the beginning. My gosh, I can't wait to get retouching. But before I can do any retouching, I have to get the painting onto a support. Now, the client did not want to replace this replacement strainer—it's not original to the painting—with a proper stretcher, so I saved it. But I had to do an interleaved lining to immobilize the canvas because I can't add tension to a rigid strainer. It's not keyable. That said, the stretching process is relatively the same. I use the same three ounce sterilized steel tacks, the same magnetic hammer. I start from the center of each edge and work my way to the corners. But in this case, it's a little bit more forgiving because there is no slack in the canvas. I don't have to pull it too much because, well, it doesn't really stretch. And however it's stretched, well, that's how it's going to be. There's really nothing I can do afterwards. Now, luckily, the interleaved lining keeps it flat and rigid, so there isn't going to be much deformation. Now, that said, in a gross contradiction, I will still use my pulling pliers just to make sure that everything is as taut and flat as can be. And when I come to the corners, I will tuck them in and tack them down so that they are folded under and tight. An extra tack here or there isn't going to hurt anybody. Now, after stretching the painting, I will focus on the back. And this is almost completely unnecessary. You could simply cut off the excess canvas and leave it. But I like the way that this looks, and it's my studio, so there. Now, the area with the chalk writing that the client wanted to preserve, I will cut the canvas and make a little recess so that it can be viewed. I don't know what this writing says, nor do I know if it's important, but it's not up to me to make those decisions, only to accommodate what my client wishes. And coming to the corners, I do get to decide how this is handled. And because I'm not going to cut anything off, I'll fold it under and tack it a few times. And this, again, just looks really tidy, and it's really tight. More important if I'm stretching a canvas with keys, but nonetheless, I can still do it here. And finally, I'll put my label back on the support. And then that's it. Well, not really. Before I do any retouching on this painting, I'm going to be putting down a base coat. Now, sometimes I call it an isolation layer, and sometimes not. It really just depends on the function for the painting. For this painting, it's not isolating the original paint from anything, because the original paint is stable. It's not going to deteriorate with exposure to solvents. What it's doing here is simulating the original colors. You can see, as I paint on this resin, how different the painting looks. Well, that's how it's going to look when it's varnished. And so, this enables me to retouch according to what the painting will look like when it's finished, not when it's dry. If I don't do this technique, and I match my colors to the dry painting, when I apply the final varnish, well, everything's going to look different, and I'm going to have to start over again. So, this allows me to see what the final painting will look like, and work according to that. So, it's less of an isolation layer, and maybe more of a cheat code, I guess. And now, on to retouching, which is easily my favorite and least favorite part of conservation. Scraping is mind-numbing and boring, but retouching is really intense. It takes a lot of focus, a lot of attention, and it is completely exhausting. In fact, I have to remind myself to breathe and to relax when I'm doing this work. Now, I'm using a different medium than normal. I've had this paint for many years, and have played with it on and off, but I never felt completely comfortable with it. It handles a little bit differently than the old medium that I used, and I just wasn't completely comfortable. But I am a person who can evolve, and with enough practice, and changing my technique a little bit, well, I found a way to make this work. And among the reasons that I like this is because it has incredibly good flow, and great opacity, meaning that it's easier to apply, and it has greater covering power than the other medium that I use. Now, it does have its own unique set of characteristics, some of which I don't like, but, you know, I can accommodate those. If there is compelling enough reason to switch mediums because it's superior, well, then I'd be a fool not to use it. I'll still keep the old medium for other projects where it's more suited, but I think this is going to be the medium that I use going forward. We'll see. Maybe I'll change my mind. Now, I'm starting with the face because, well, I really, really want to see how this comes out. And I like retouching skin tones because there's a high concentration of white, which, for some reason, makes more sense to me, and they're easier to match. Perhaps other conservators feel differently. But getting an easy win, as I've talked about in the important. Starting off with the most difficult part of the retouching may not be the best approach because the odds of success going in cold are lower than if one chooses an easier path. There's a reason they call it low-hanging fruit. And so, even though the face is perhaps the most important part of the painting, and the thing that we're all going to be looking at, for me, it is the easiest. I've also been really excited about retouching this painting, so I don't want to wait any longer. I mean, who wants to open the biggest birthday present last? Come on. Now, retouching is an interesting art because, at the same time, we have to make the damage go away, try to understand what the artist was doing, be limited, and also be conscious of what we're doing such that it has no personality or style. Now, there are many different approaches to retouching. There is what I'm doing, which is called Mimitech, in which we try to mimic or recreate what was lost. There is also Trattegio, which is an Italian technique whereby we use little hash marks or dots so to camouflage the damage from a distance but reveal it up close. Now, because my paints are reversible, I don't often do a Trattegio technique. In fact, in 22 or so years, I've only had a handful of clients request it, even museums, because ultimately we can remove this retouching if somebody decides in the future that a different approach is warranted. And so, the technique of Trattegio was really developed before reversible paints, when we were retouching with oil colors, and maybe removing them wasn't possible. It was an accommodation to imperfect materials. But we have more perfect materials now, so we can change our approach. This is not to say that one is better than the other, they're just different and have different applications. And as I take a step back and let you watch some of the retouching, I will leave you with some Debussy, because, well, she's French and, you know, it makes sense, right? I'll chime back in when something's interesting, so don't skip ahead too far. Now, here is an interesting comparison between the retouching I was doing on the face and what I'm doing here on the hand. If we take a look at the hand, it is not a unified surface. There are lots of little dark spots, little chips and color variations. It's a fairly visually textured area, compared to the face, which was very smooth, almost one color, with no distraction. So here, I am using lots and lots of little different colored dots, so maybe it is a hybrid technique of Mimitech and Trattegio. My goal is not for this retouching to be obvious when we look at it, but I want it to blend in, and so by using lots of little dots to simulate the varied nature of the color surrounding it, I can achieve that effect. And that's one thing that's really fun about retouching, is that there is no single approach that works everywhere. We have to change our approach based on the landscape that we find. Sometimes we need to use lots of little dots, sometimes smooth, even brushstrokes, sometimes a hybrid of both, sometimes even our fingers come into play. How we get to the finish line is less important than getting there. And here, I think I've gotten to the finish line pretty successfully, don't you? Now the other hand, on the other hand, is really a mess. You can see that there was a lot of paint loss going directly through the hand, and really, we just have the basic shape of it. Now, in addition, there was a lot of overpaint on this hand before. In fact, the hand was almost not visible, it was so covered up. So I have to figure out a way to recreate this hand. And unfortunately, I don't have anything to work from. I don't know who the artist was, and I don't have any of their other works to compare against. The other hand on the painting is very different, and isn't really that instructive here. Now, I do have a fairly good understanding of anatomy, and I have hands that I can look at, but that only gets me so far. Really, I have to rely on what I have on the canvas. I can use looking at other hands or my hands to fill in the big gaps when I'm thinking about structure, but when it comes to the particulars of the skin tone, the way the light is falling on the hand, or the actual shape, well, I have to make something that matches with the rest of the painting. And this artist was talented, no doubt. I don't know if I could paint this well, but hands were probably not their specialty. At least this hand wasn't their specialty. It's a beautiful pose, but the hand is rendered kind of clumsily, and maybe that's because the old cleaning has resulted in a lot of the original paint being removed, or the damage, or whatever the case may be. This is not the best hand I have ever seen. Which means that my retouching can't be focused on recreating the best hand. It simply has to this hand, with all of its weird, clumsy shapes and forms. And that's one thing that's sometimes frustrating about retouching. I would much rather paint a beautiful hand than recreate a clunky hand. But it's also what's challenging and interesting about retouching. Trying to get into the artist's head, or at least trying to figure out their style and how to get from where we were to where we want to go. All doing so within the confines of the ethics that we as conservators must abide by. And that is really the challenge. I could simply repaint this hand, and it would look gorgeous. It may even look perfect. It would fit the other hand. But that's not something I'm allowed to do. I can only retouch where the paint has been lost. And so that's what makes it really challenging. Now here is another example of something that's challenging with retouching. On the right, the area is fairly clean and bright. And on the left, well, it's kind of muddy. We can see that there are all of these little dark spots, kind of greenish brownish embedded in the brushstrokes. And that's not surface grime, that's not old varnish. I suspect that is probably old oil from the paint that has leached out and then darkened and oxidized over time. That can't really be removed. So I have to find a way to make my retouching match that or blend in. Because if it's too crisp, too clean, well, it'll give itself away. And here, as I'm trying to recreate this button or whatever it is, you can see my first pass is a little bit too bright, the colors are too crisp, and it stands out. So I have to muddy it up a bit, I have to add some color so that our eye passes over it. Because that's really what we want our retouching to do, is allow our eyes and our brains to see it as normal, as it should be, not as a recreation or not as damage. Now certainly under magnification, or if one were to tell you this area was retouched, you might be able to pull out the areas that were recreated. You might be able to see it. But if I present the painting to you as a whole, my bet is that when I'm done, you're going to see the forests, not the individual trees. And that is a measure of successful retouching. And with all of that retouching done, it is finally now time for the varnish. And I'm excited because I really want to see this painting finished. I'm going to go over it just to make sure there are no little fuzzes or little chips of paint from the edges. Even a brush on the surface is sometimes necessary to make sure that it's ready for varnish. Now here I'm going to be using my spray system to apply the final coating of varnish. I want a fairly glossy varnish and I'm not going to be brushing it out. So once I've mixed the varnish that I want, I will go back and forth applying an even thin coating of varnish. Not a thick one, I don't want this built up. And I'll come back from a little bit higher up and add some gloss as it's passing through the air and drying so that it hits the surface and sticks and gives a really beautiful crystalline quality. Once I've taken a look at it and I'm happy, well, I'm done. So here she is, the Countess, in all of her resplendent glory. Beautifully painted, in gorgeous clothing, finally put back together. We can see that all of the areas of lifting paint have been flattened and bonded back to the canvas. There are no signs of water damage or instability anymore. The areas that were completely overpainted and muddy have been recreated and we can get a better sense of what the artist wanted us to see, of what the Countess was wearing, of who she was. Areas of massive overpainting have been removed and the delicacy of the brushwork has been revealed. All absolutely necessary for a of such beauty. And though it involved some creative thinking and reversing some of my normal procedures, that's kind of what this whole job is about, creative problem solving. And if we focus and don't get too intimidated, well, the results are within reach. So as we met her, well, she was kind of a hot mess and actively coming apart. Once she was clean, things looked a little bit better. And even better still when all of the overpaint and fill-in was removed. But truly, nothing could prepare us for what she really looked like. And whether her future is on an estate or in a modest apartment, she will certainly now be the Lady of That Manor. Thanks for watching and if you had any questions about this or any of my other projects, join me over on Patreon, where in addition to ad and sponsor free videos, I take questions and answer them in a follow-up epilogue video, exclusive only to Patreon.