Rough Waters

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Though the water in this scene is calm, for me and this painting, ahead lies rough waters. Whenever we start a new project, we hope for smooth sailing. But in the case of this painting, as we'll see, we hit some rough waters. And while getting back on course is possible, it's a lot of work. But with Squarespace, there's nothing but tailwinds ahead. And it's not because you won't run into turbulence building your first website. You will. But Squarespace is one step ahead, with a life raft, compass, and a spare paddle. If you're not a graphic designer, no worry. They have thousands of beautifully designed, mobile-friendly website templates that will get you up and running with one click. And if you're not a coder, don't worry. You can add and remove features to the website again with one click. Things like an online ecommerce solution, contact forms, website gallery, scheduling, and more. 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And this is going to hold the paint in place, protect it while I handle it, and hopefully make sure that we don't have any losses during the removal of the canvas, which will come a little bit later. I'll start off making a so-called union jack, working the ripples out to the edges, and making sure that I have good contact everywhere. And then, I'll let it dry. Later, once I'm sure that it's dry, I can begin removing this canvas from the stretcher, which really doesn't take much effort at all, because it is barely held on. I think there were a total of four or five tacks that were holding this tattered tacking edge to this support. This is a result of pest infestation. Something got a hold of this painting and decided to eat the canvas. And this is one of the main reasons we no longer use rabbit skin glue for linings. Not only is it hygroscopic, meaning that it absorbs moisture and will swell and create cracks and can contribute to mold growth, but pests love it. Mice and insects will eat this protein-based adhesive like it's supper. And in this case, that's exactly what they did, nearly chewing off the canvas from the support. In addition, they chewed through a lot of the canvas, so this needs to be removed. You can see here how much of it is missing. There's areas where there's nothing. And on top of eating the old canvas and the adhesive, they have eaten through the original canvas in places, leaving just a layer of paint. This is a pretty bad pest infestation. So this canvas needs to come off. And I start by working it with a new blade, very sharp scalpel, trying to remove it dry, because I don't really want to introduce moisture at this stage to the canvas. But it's very well bonded. This rabbit skin glue is very stiff, and it's not yielding as well as I would have hoped. It's chewing through blades, and it's going to be really, really difficult and kind of perilous to remove it dry. So I've decided to introduce moisture and soften up that rabbit skin glue adhesive. This is a mixture called laponite, which is a synthetic clay that absorbs water, effectively turning water into gel. This slows down the evaporation rate, allows me to have a little bit more control than if it were just free water. And when applied to the back of the canvas, it will penetrate through that lining canvas and to the adhesive, which, as I mentioned, is hygroscopic. And so that adhesive will absorb this water and soften up. Then I can come back with my scalpel and begin removing it. It is still very difficult. There is something in this rabbit skin glue adhesive, an additive of sorts, that is resisting the water penetration. Now, rabbit skin glue linings, or wax paste linings, or all historic linings, are like recipes. There's a base, but every conservator will change it according to their needs, wants, limitations, restrictions, so on and so forth. A pinch of this, a pinch of that, a dash of this, a dash of that. And in this case, I think, I think, based on the smell and the feel of the adhesive, the conservator added some rosin. Now, rosin mixed with a rabbit skin glue adhesive will give it much more strength. The problem is that rosin is not a water-soluble material. It requires solvent. But rabbit skin glue is a water-soluble material and doesn't work with solvent. So what the conservator has done in this case is chosen the best of both worlds to make the worst possible outcome. Two different adhesives that require two different removal techniques bonded into one, making it almost impossible to remove it easily. And I tried, but as you can see here, there are areas where the paint was lost. The adhesive was just too strong, and in those areas where the pests had eaten through not only the lining adhesive, but also the original canvas, that paint just turned to dust. And unfortunately, the facing just did not hold. We're on rough waters indeed. Our next step is the hot table, where we are going to treat this painting. And you've noticed that I've done it face down. Well, that's because there are areas where the canvas, original canvas, is missing. And if I did it face up, the pressure would deflect that paint layer down into those divots and permanently alter it. So by doing it face down, the paint layer is very smooth. I can ensure that we don't have any deviation of the paint layer. Once the painting has been heated up and allowed to cool, I can remove all of the materials. And this nylon layer prevents the excess adhesive from bonding this canvas to the blotter paper. And yes, I've done that before, and it is a royal pain and embarrassing. And ultimately, it just requires me to then scrape off the paper. It is not the end of the world, but it is certainly frustrating, and one that, after this many years of doing it, is a mistake I should avoid. The painting needs to be pressed overnight, at least, just to make sure that there's no distortion, while any ambient moisture dissipates and the painting comes to relative humidity of the studio. The next day, I can remove the painting from the weights, and we can see if it's flat. Spoiler alert, it's flat. That's precisely why I pressed the painting. And it's a really simple procedure with really basic tools, but it is very impactful and one that cannot be skipped. Now, it may be difficult to see, but if you look closely, you can notice areas where the canvas has been eaten away by those pests, and there's just paint layer. And this is precisely why I did the hot table treatment face down. This is a problem, and I need to rectify this. I need to take action to correct this issue, and it's a little bit unconventional. What I've decided to do is add a semi-permanent backing to this painting. Now, by semi-permanent, I mean that I'm using a conservation-grade reversible adhesive, and I'm going to take this flat-spun nylon gossamer. This is incredibly strong, very, very thin nylon, and using this adhesive, which can be reversed, I'm going to adhere it to the back of the painting. Now, when I say semi-permanent, I mean it can be reversed. This adhesive is designed for conservation, but what would be the point? Maybe in the future, in a thousand years, there's a way to nano-create canvas and fill in all of these losses, in which case this will need to come off. But realistically, if we don't take action now, this painting will have problems in the future. And this, well, it is reversible, but I don't intend for it to ever come off, nor do I expect it ever will. So I'm painting on this adhesive through the nylon, and I'm really tamping it down because I want to make sure that in all of the nooks and crannies, all of those areas where the paint is standing free, where the canvas has been eaten away, this nylon makes contact. Once secured, I'll put down a piece of release film, some felt, a board to distribute pressure, and then some weights. And then I'll let it sit for a couple of hours. After letting it sit, I'll come and remove the weights, the board, the felt, and the release film, and I'll check on it. I don't expect it to be dry. I just expect it to be, well, more dry. And as long as it's not super sticky, a little bit of tack is fine. I can let it air dry for a little bit, and you can see, look at all of those little white spots. That's just paint with no canvas. After waiting and putzing around the studio for a couple of hours, I'm going to come and check on this painting and see if it is dry. The adhesive dries pretty quickly, so it only takes about six or so hours from start to finish, and you can see it's dry. All of these little areas that you can see, white spots, that's where there's just raw paint. That's where the pests have eaten through the canvas. So now you can understand why it was critically important that this layer be applied. But I'm not done, because this layer is just not strong enough to provide adequate support for the entire painting. It needs a lining, and the first step in doing that is applying the adhesive. But I'm applying a different nylon gossamer, one that has a little bit more weight to it. It's not flat-spun. It has a texture to it, and that's going to allow a little bit more adhesive to be held, and that adhesive is going to help fill in some of those little grooves and divots and gaps where the canvas is missing. If I don't apply this gossamer, and I use a very very thin layer of adhesive, we'll have starved joints, so to speak. Areas where there is no adhesive and no contact, and that's a weakness. Now there's a lot of material on the back of this painting right now that just doesn't need to be there, so I'm going to trim it off. Now, unfortunately, the original tacking edge was just so decomposed that it's not salvageable. Handling it just turned it into dust. So I'm trimming off all of that material to the size of the painting, and then I'm cutting my PET film down to size. When I do an interleaf lining, I cut the PET film slightly smaller than the original painting, perhaps a 16 inch on each side, and that's just to make sure that it is smaller than the painting's face and the stretcher, because while the canvas can bend, the PET film is quite rigid. So if it was a little bit larger than the stretcher, it would be impossible to stretch this painting. A new piece of Belgian linen canvas is prepared with an adhesive film that's ironed on. The painting is tacked into place, and then it's transferred over to the hot table, where again, we do the lining face down. This all takes place on a piece of cotton rag paper, which is very fine and smooth, a layer of release film, then all of the webbing and stuff to draw out the air and create a nice even pressure onto the canvas. The vacuum table is really strong, and it can easily get up to 30 mercury inches, but I don't want that. That could crush the painting. So I'm going to lower it down to a level that I'm comfortable with, and this is mostly learned through trial and error and experience. There's no set rule for what does and doesn't work. While the painting is on the hot table, I will turn my attention to the support, which unfortunately has been compromised by pests, too. But I didn't see that when I did the examination, and now we're in a little bit of a situation where we don't have the budget or time to replace it. So I'm going to try to salvage it through these, again, rough waters. I've created a little tray, and I've poured in an resin-based mixture, and I'm going to submerge this support in this mixture. This is a very thin resin, and in order to keep it down, I'm going to take this little fancy wire contraption that I've made and just hold it under this liquid. And you can see all of the air escaping. Well, that's all of the resin penetrating deep into the cavities the pests created that weakened this wooden support. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes for each piece of the support to be fully saturated with resin and for it to stop bubbling. Now, if I had a vacuum chamber, I could do this all in, oh, two or three minutes. But I don't have that yet, so I'm doing it the slow old-fashioned way. Once out of the resin, I can let these air dry for a couple of hours, and then I'm done. At least with the stretcher. But there's plenty of work to be done on the painting, and it all starts by removing this facing. And it's interesting, because this facing, hell, you can see that it's really well bonded to the surface of the paint layer. It takes quite some time and quite some effort for me to get it loose, but it didn't do everything I had hoped. And so maybe my choice of a lightweight paper and the fish gelatin was incorrect. That my assumption that this was going to work because it's worked so many times before maybe needs to be revisited. One thing that the paper did do, however, is lift up all of that old surface grime. Meaning that I no longer have to do that removal. I can jump right into varnish removal when it's time to clean the painting. So while the facing may have failed, it also kind of didn't fail. It's complicated, but for sure, it's something that I'm going to be revisiting and auditing for the future. Now as we get into cleaning, you can see the losses that were a result of removing that old lining. This is not what I had hoped would happen. I took safeguards to avoid this, but sometimes that's just how it goes. You chart a course and you hit an unforeseen storm. And in conservation, it's almost verboten to talk about this when things go sideways. It's as if every project we do is 100% successful 100% of the time and that's just not how it works in conservation or even in life. And anybody who tells you otherwise is taking you for a mark. Sometimes things go sideways and it's not because we did a sloppy job or we chose the wrong materials or we chose the wrong course of action. Sometimes these things just happen. Ask any contractor, ask any doctor, ask anybody. And they've come across situations in their life where things, well, just didn't go according to plan. But we learn from these mistakes. We assess why they went wrong and we change our course for next time. We're better prepared. We know how to stop these things from becoming problems. And in the case of this painting, I think my choice of a lightweight huashicozo and the fish gelatin was probably not sufficient. I should have chosen something heavier with a stronger bond. And next time I will know and I will evolve and I will learn. Now despite all of this, what lies beneath this old discolored varnish is a gorgeous painting. But turning it into something that is going to be displayed on a wall, well, we've got some work ahead of us. Before I can retouch this piece and even before I can think about filling in the losses, I need to prepare the surface. That starts by applying an acrylic gesso to the areas of loss because the fill-in medium just does not stick very well to this adhesive layer that is now exposed. And if I apply it, well, eventually it's going to pop off. So this step ensures that that fill-in stays put for a very long time. While that layer of ground dries, I can begin reassembling this support now that it's all dry and ready for the painting to be reunited with it. It's a complicated support, a little bit unconventional, and so it takes me a couple of minutes to figure out where and how to start. But, you know, like anything, you just dive into it and figure it out as you go along. If you wait until the perfect time or the perfect answer, you're never going to do anything. The painting can now be placed on the support, aligned with it, and then tacked to the support. And even though this painting has an interleaf lining and we don't need to add a lot of tension to it, I'm still going to add as much as I can with my hands. I'm not going to use my mechanical pulling pliers. I just want to take up any of the excess slack in the canvas, because that can always be a problem in the future. It can create waves and bulges and, you know, just doesn't need to be there. Once the painting is all tacked on, I can remove all of the excess canvas and start cleaning up the back by trimming the canvas to size, folding it over, and then tacking it down onto the back with some lighter weight tacks. Again, there are many different ways to deal with this back of canvas, and this is just the way that I choose because I really enjoy this process. I think it looks really nice and, you know, it makes it easier for the next person, as compared to if I had glued this down, which we find often. And that's a real pain, because removing excess adhesive from the back of canvas when you don't need to, well, you know what I'm talking about. Once this is all tacked down and the corners are finished, I can then put some keys in. Now, again, the stretching of this canvas isn't critically necessary because it has an interleaf, but I do want to take up any slack, and also the keys help keep this stretcher tight. Remember, these joints are floating. There's no glue or nails or other mechanical fasteners. So this is it. These keys keep it square. I used keys that I had in my collection of keys because they fit. I didn't have to cut new ones. And then, once they're in place, I'll bind them with a little bit of fishing line and another tack, just to make sure they never get lost. Now I can begin filling in all of those losses, and I'm using a putty that's water-based. It's chalk and a couple of other different ingredients. And I'm just going to go through and hit every spot where I feel it's needed. All of those areas where I put the ground, and any areas where there was previous loss. Once all of that's dry, I can then begin removing all of that fill-in. If you notice, I did a lot of fill-in, covering a lot of the painting. It's easier to overfill and then remove than it is to try to keep the fill-in constrained just to the areas of loss. I'll take a dampened piece of felt and remove the mass of the fill-in, and then I'll come back with swabs to remove the residues. And because there is a lot of retouching, and because these blues are going to be problematic, spoiler alert, I know, I'm going to apply this resin layer to fill in some of the little deviations, and also to give me a better chance at matching colors for the retouching process. Now I mentioned that these blues were going to be problematic. Well, watch where I retouch, and keep your eye there. And you'll notice that the retouching paints look good when I put them on, and then they start to darken. Well, that's just one of the anomalies and weird things about these retouching paints, is sometimes when there's a lot of white, they darken as they dry. So what I have to do is, in my head, make things one or two degrees lighter, which looks wrong and is confusing, and then expect it to darken. But unfortunately, it doesn't always darken predictably. Different colors of blue change the darkening rate and how the colors change. So this is just the first of many passes, where I'm basically just kind of getting rid of the white, trying to put some blue there. And then I will come back again, and again, to make refining passes, to go over the areas that are a little too dark, a little too light, and bring them in accord with the surrounding paint. But you can see, just on this first really rough pass, it's looking exponentially better. Those losses are starting to disappear, and we're starting to be able to see the atmosphere and the sense of space that the artist created, which of course is what we want. All of those little areas of loss and damage betray that work, and so we have to get rid of them. This retouching here took about, oh, I don't know, an hour and a half or so. But then the successive rounds of retouching probably totaled five or six hours total of retouching, which for a painting of this size is quite a lot. And it's all down to the fact that these blues were really hard to retouch. Sometimes colors cooperate, and sometimes they don't. So this one took a little bit more work than I anticipated. Rough waters, choppy waters, I don't know. Maybe I just thought I was going for a cool sail. With all of the retouching now finally complete, and I'm happy with all of the colors, I can apply the final varnish. This is going to protect the painting from handling fingerprints, dust, dirt, and ultraviolet light. It's also going to allow me to unify the sheen. Because when you do retouching, sometimes that retouching is more matte or more glossy than the surrounding painting. And of course, we don't want those areas to be uneven. So applying this varnish and then brushing it out gives a beautiful surface and makes the painting look whole. When the painting arrived at the studio, I assumed that it was going to be smooth sailing. That the painting would cooperate, that the procedures and techniques that I would need to conserve this painting, those that I had done countless times before, would serve me well here, too. That, however, was not the case. This painting proved to be a little bit more tricky. And during the process, there were several areas where I hit turbulence or rough waters. But by staying the course and staying focused, I was able to overcome these challenges and continue on the journey. And now, with the painting fully conserved, all of the damage addressed, it's stabilized for the future, well, it looks pretty spectacular. And though this was a bumpy ride, sometimes that's just how it goes. And being able to main- But ultimately, when we look at the painting as it arrived, and then compared to as it is leaving, I think that I have navigated these rough waters well.