Giving Dignity to the Duplicate

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Now I am pretty excited about this piece. Even though it's a copy, it's still a really beautiful painting with some pretty significant problems, and that always is exciting to me. Yes, I know, I'm broken, but this is my job, and I really enjoy challenges like this. So the first thing that I need to do is start taking this piece apart, and that begins by removing tacks and separating the canvas from the support. Now these tacks are very, very, very, very, very, very old, and as I go to pull them out, many of them just snap apart. The heads pop right off, and they leave the shaft stuck in the wood. That's if I can get them out. You see here, I'm really struggling just to get one tack out. And unfortunately, even when I can get them out, they usually snap off. So I'm switching to a different tool. I'm going to just grab onto the shaft and see if I can pull them out. And you can see that, number one, these are really big tacks, and they're really, really rusty. That's probably just a result of the climate that this painting was stored in, or maybe the wood being a little bit too green when the painting was tacked to it. Eventually, I do get all of those tacks out, and boy was it some work. And then I can start lifting off this strainer support from the canvas. And it's a little stuck because some of the ground layer on the canvas has penetrated through and stuck to the support. This canvas doesn't look like it was ever sized, and that's a really important step that, if missed, can result in this situation. Now, removing this big patch is luckily easier than removing those tacks. The adhesive has failed, and there really wasn't enough adhesive on this patch to make it effective. This is kind of performative conservation, I suppose, where it looks like it's doing something but really isn't. Now, the residue of the adhesive also needs to come off, and here I'll turn to a scalpel. This is a water-based adhesive, and I could employ water or laponite to soften it and remove it, but it's so deteriorated that using a scalpel and kind of chipping it off dry is actually faster and cleaner. It doesn't allow any of this adhesive to reconstitute and penetrate into the canvas layer, which is something I don't want. So, sometimes removing it dry is the best approach. Now, there's not a ton of adhesive on the back, but where it's on, it is pretty thick, so it takes a couple of passes and a little bit of effort to separate it from the canvas. Eventually, though, I will get all of this removed, and then we'll have the canvas free and clear of this attempted intervention. But feeling the canvas, I notice that there are a lot of bumps. There are slubs, which are just defects in the canvas weave, and areas of ground that have penetrated through the canvas and then pooled up on the back. And all of these need to be removed because they are texture that, when we put the painting on the hot table, will transfer through the painting to the face of the painting, and we will see all of these as bumps. So, more scalpel work. And what I'm trying to do is just glide over the surface and remove all of those bumps, not shave down the canvas at all. I want to preserve the weave. And then I can vacuum it up and clean it up and just make sure that I've picked up every little bit and gotten all the little bumps off. But inevitably, I miss some. And you can see, just right here, it doesn't look like a lot, but when I run the scalpel over it, you can see what's coming off. And those little bits of remaining ground layer will transfer to the front of the painting, and they'll become bumps that catch the light and become distracting. So, I'll make another final pass, just making sure that I've gotten all of those off. And then, when I'm done, I can take the painting to the back, to the small hot table, where we will do the first of several treatments. And this is going to be the vapor treatment, whereby employing moisture, heat, and pressure, we can soften the canvas fibers, the weave, and then we can flatten them using pressure, and then cool them and dry them in place, effectively ironing this painting without an iron. Now, below the painting, there is a piece of 100% cotton acid-free rag paper, then a nylon release layer to make sure any adhesive doesn't cause the canvas to stick to the blotter paper, and then some cotton webbing that will allow me to extract the air, some through bag connectors, and then a sheet of mylar on top. This all gets taped down to create an airtight seal, and then I pull out all of the air, creating downward pressure. The table is heated up, and I'll use a bone folder here to kind of encourage some of these high spots down flat. Once the table has cooled, I can turn off the vacuum pump, and I can remove the mylar envelope, and take the painting, which is now flat, over to the drywall tables, where I will press it. This is critically important because there is moisture still suspended in this canvas. If we don't press it, as that moisture evaporates and escapes the canvas, it will cause the canvas to distort, and it will have negated all of the work that I've just done. A piece of felt helps conform to the surface of the painting and protect it, and then the drywall comes down, and a cinder block on top. Once the painting has been allowed to acclimatize to the studio's relative humidity, and all that ambient moisture has escaped, I can come back to the front, and I can start dealing with these losses. Now, I certainly could photograph this, or scan this, bring it into the computer, trace it, adjust it, trace it again, do some more adjusting, and then send it over to my laser cutter. And if this painting had dozens upon dozens of losses, or some really complicated ones, that would probably be the approach that I take, but sometimes the basic analog approach is faster and easier, particularly when it's only one or two little losses like this. And the first thing I'll do is trace those losses with a pencil. I just need to get the approximate shape of the void, and then I can take my scissors and cut it out. And it really only takes, what, two, three minutes total to do this work? By the time I even set the laser cutter up, I could be done with three or four of these. So just because we have the fancy tools doesn't mean they are the right tools for the job, and that's something that often takes a lot of experience to recognize. See? Fits nicely, huh? No laser cutter required. Once I've gotten all of those little inlays, I think there were two or three, in place, I can then take the painting back to the spray room, and I can apply the adhesive coating that will be necessary for the interleaved lining process. Because this painting has a really big nasty tear in it, in the center of it, and it goes kind of every which way, an interleaved lining is really the best approach to keep this painting stable and flat. But I'm adding a piece of flat spun nylon gossamer. Because the canvas weave is fairly thick, and this painting is really thick, I want to make sure that there's a little bit more adhesive than I would otherwise be comfortable just simply rolling out. So using this nylon gossamer allows me to make sure the adhesive is a little bit thicker, and to make sure that the smooth PET film has good purchase and good contact with the rough textured canvas. One other benefit to this is that it helps stabilize the canvas for handling. But there's a lot of leftover flat spun nylon gossamer, and so I'll trim that off using a scalpel blade. When this is pressed down into the lining, it mostly disappears, but getting rid of all of this excess material is not necessary. But it certainly looks nice, and if I can make it look nice, I say why not? So now comes the point where I assemble the interleaved lining sandwich. And I'll run my hand over every surface to make sure that they're smooth and free of bumps. I'll iron on the adhesive film to the new canvas, and the PET film, the original canvas. And then it's all put together and tacked into place, and brought to the back to the hot table once again for the actual fusing process. The table is heated up, this time to a higher temperature than before. The same cotton webbing and the same through bag connectors, kind of the same setup, except this time there is a release layer on the face of the painting. Just in case any adhesive squeezes through, we don't want to glue the painting to the mylar. And yes, I've done it many, many times. It's not the end of the world. We can certainly undo it, but if we can avoid making a careless error, it kind of seems like low-hanging fruit. Again, with the heat up to temperature, the vacuum pressure applied, I can come back, this time with the bone folder, and work those high areas down. And then we let the painting cool. Once it's room temperature, I can turn off the vacuum pump. I can remove the painting from this little envelope, and I can take it to the front of the studio, where it's time to start cleaning this painting. And I'm pretty excited to see what we have. I know this painting has been partially cleaned in the past, but I think that the majority of it hasn't been cleaned. I think the areas in the sky have been cleaned, the areas where the painting has been skinned have been cleaned, but there are areas that look significantly dirty and grimy, and I want to see what those look like when the old varnish is removed. And it's a subtle change, but actually, it's not so subtle. Getting rid of that old varnish reveals a much purer, much brighter color underneath. And that's what we want to get to, because that's what the artist put down. So, we have a little work cut out for us. Once all of that varnish has been removed, and we can see all of those bright and beautiful colors that were hidden underneath it, it's time to address all of the losses. Now, even though there is an inlay, that inlay is not perfect, and that's by design. It's a little bit shallow, because I want to be able to put down a layer of fill-in material that I can sculpt, or sand, or smooth, or do whatever I need to make sure that the retouching has a surface to be received that will match the rest of the painting. So, once I've applied the fill-in, before it completely dries, I'll use my fingers and the palm of my hand just to remove as much of it as I can, because that means that when it comes time for the swabs, it's a little bit easier to remove the excess. It's not terribly difficult to remove this, and I'm always shocked and surprised when I find paintings where all of this leftover material has just been left, and the painting has been kind of overpainted and glazed in. It's just wrong. Now, just like the back of the painting, the front needs a little bit of work with the scalpel. There are still some areas of fill-in and old overpaint that are standing proud, and so I'm using my scalpel here just to remove the high spots of the fill-in to make sure that it's nice and smooth, because, again, the light will catch all of these little nubs and high points, and you'll see them, and that will give away the retouching, which, of course, we don't want. Now, before I can reunite the painting with its strainer support, this again is non-keyable, I need to do a little work on it, and the first thing I'm doing is removing all of that ground that was stuck on. This was textural and bumpy, and it doesn't need to be there, particularly because we want the painting to be on a smooth support, but this support has no bevel, so I'm going to add one by cutting a bunch of little wood strips and then gluing them down onto the strainer. This is going to allow a little bit of airflow in between the strainer and the canvas, and keep the canvas off of the edges of the strainer. This is less important for an interleaved painting, but it still matters, and while we have the opportunity to correct this, we can, so we should. So a little bit of wood glue, a lot of clamps, and some time, and this will be all set. Next day, I can come back, remove all of these clamps, and do a little bit of finishing work on this little bevel or lip that I've added. I'm going to plane down the edge so it's a little bit rounder, and then I'm going to trim off some of it and do some sanding to make sure that it's nice and smooth. Now again, this is not critically necessary, but I have the opportunity, I have the materials, the skill, and the know-how to do this, and so it seems like it's, again, low-hanging fruit. Why wouldn't I do everything possible to make sure that this painting is conserved as best as possible? So now it is time to reunite the painting with the support, and one of the nice things about an interleaved painting is that the size is already determined by the painting itself. There's not much work we have to do to align this painting. Because the interleaved material is not flexible, we can't really bend it over the stretcher bar, so wherever it ends, it ends, and that's the edge. Once I'm happy with where it sits, I can begin the tacking process. Now, because this wood is so dense or hard or filled with sap or something, it takes quite a bit of effort to get these tacks in, which is also probably why it took so much effort to get the old ones out. But eventually, I will get all of these tacks driven into the support and the painting fully tacked to this support, and at that point, I can start trimming off all of the excess canvas. It's so much easier to trim it off now than it is to try to make it perfect before it's stretched. Here, I just have to trim it and clean it, and before, there's a lot of measuring and a lot of hoping and wishing involved. Once all that excess is trimmed off, it's time to deal with it, and this is how I do it. Fold it over and then tack it down with some lighter weight tacks. It just keeps it nice and tidy, keeps the canvas from fraying, there's no glues involved, and it's a nice, simple, clean way of dealing with all of the excess canvas. And then it is time to add the synthetic resin coating that we call the isolation layer, and it helps if your brush fits into the jar. So, second time is a charm. This is really helpful because it saturates the colors, it provides a really receptive surface for the retouching medium to stick to, and it can help fill in some of the little cracks or little divots where the fill-in medium was just too thick, or like with cracks, the fill-in medium just won't go in. This helps create a nice, smooth surface. And similarly to regular varnish, I'll brush it out, making sure it's smooth and even, and pick up any debris that I find along the way. Once that's dry, it's time for retouching, and if I was excited about cleaning this painting, I'm even more excited about retouching it. This is a challenging project to retouch, but the painting is small, so that seems okay. I'm not terribly overwhelmed by it, there's going to be a lot of detailed work, but again, it's a small painting, so it feels manageable. And the first place I'm going to start is in this background right area, where at some point in the past, during an attempted cleaning, the painting was skinned so heavily that, well, pretty much everything was removed. Now I've looked at the original, and it is not similar. There is a very different landscape in the background, so this is not a direct copy, and it's unfortunate because I can't use the original as a source material. So I'm using this as a source material, the other side to be specific. And there are some trees on the other side that I like, and I think this might have been a tree at some point. We'll see. Now on to the rest of the retouching. In the areas where it's skinned, I'm doing what's called a glazing technique. Because there is some color there, just not the intensity of color that was there before, I'm taking very thinned out paint, in this case red, and just applying it on the areas where there's losses, and the areas where it's been skinned. And even just that thin layer of paint helps unify that area, makes it look solid and whole and less damaged. Now for the main feature, there is a lot of glazing to be done. You can see just how many areas have been abraded thin and the paint is missing. Now luckily this is a fairly predictable area to retouch, and there is a lot of information still here to use. I can lean into the understanding of fabric that I have. I can look at the areas on the painting specifically where there are pleats and folds and highlights and use them. And that's really what retouching is about, using the information that you have in front of you and your accumulated information after many years of retouching to come up with something that is going to be acceptable to the eye and the brain. Something that is going to allow us to see the whole and to skim over the areas of damage. And yes, unless we have a very high resolution photograph from which we can work, all retouching is somewhat inventive. I don't really know if this brushwork goes from left to right, or if it's vertical, or if this is the precise color brown. And to some degree it's not necessarily important that it is perfect on a molecular or microscopic level, because that's not how we see paintings. Our eyes gather the information, our brains assemble them, and then we understand them. And so if my retouching can help that process, that's the metric by which we use to judge whether it's successful or not. And everybody has a different metric. Some people want to make sure that under a microscope the color is perfectly matched. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I don't have that project in my studio, nor do I have the limitations or the clients to judge that. But in my studio, I talk with my clients about what they need out of the retouching process, what they expect the painting to look like, and what their limits or tolerance is for visible retouching or areas left a little bit rough. My goal isn't to make this painting look perfectly brand new. My goal is to make the painting look like itself. And if that means leaving some cracks or some areas a little bit thin, if that helps the illusion of the retouching look original, well then we have to consider it. These are all of the complicated insider baseball nuance elements of retouching that get really fun when you've done retouching a lot. But in the beginning, they can seem incredibly intimidating. How to balance all of these competing factors, how to balance all of these options, and then how to employ them physically with paint and brush once you've settled on an intellectual approach. But again, this all comes with practice. Like anything, you're not very good at it the first time you do it. Or the second. Or the 30th. Or the 50th. Maybe the 100th. But eventually you start to see yourself getting better, getting faster, getting more astute at making judgment calls. And then that's when it starts to get really fun. And so when I said I was excited about this piece, that's because I've got so much experience under my belt that jumping into something like this feels like an opportunity, not a challenge. I know how I'm going to retouch this. I've mixed these colors a million times. This isn't foreign to me. And because of all of that, I can lean into the fun and the excitement of it and forget the aspect of trying to rebuild a hand, very small, with very fine brushes. But again, it just comes with practice. And so it's okay to give ourselves a little bit of grace at the beginning. Heck, it's okay to give ourselves grace at the end. Even though you've done it a thousand times, maybe today is different. You woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It was raining. You got a headache. Who knows? It's okay to give yourself a little bit of leeway and to give yourself some grace when you're doing hard things. That's actually a way to be successful. When it comes time to retouching her face, there's not much that needs to be recreated. The red ribbon was completely removed, so that needs to be put back in. And then some of these cracks, they're a little bit strong for my taste. So I'm going to retouch them away or down so that they're not so problematic. And then after all of that retouching, and then a little bit more, and then taking a break, and then coming back, and doing a little bit more, and so on and so forth. This is the lather, rinse, repeat part of the conservation. I have reached a point where I think the piece is done. And now it's time to apply the final varnish. And this varnish, a different synthetic resin that was applied before the retouching, and a different synthetic resin that then what was used in the retouching, will stand on top of the painting. It will protect all of those resins, all of the colors from original to new, and it will allow me to create a sheen that I think is going to look good on this painting. Some paintings require flat matte, some super high glossy, but most somewhere in the middle. Enough gloss to make the colors look rich and vibrant, but not so much that all we focus on is the surface. And like usual, I'll brush it out because this is a technique that works for me, and I really like the results. And then, my work is done. Even though this painting was a duplicate of the original by Raphael, it was still executed with great skill and care. The application of the paint, the handling of the forms, all point to somebody who was a very accomplished oil painter. But when it arrived, it was in very rough condition. Aside from all of the ravages of time and age, it had been poorly conserved in the past. And not just poorly conserved, it had been damaged. Areas had been completely skinned, removed from the original, and the bare ground was left. Not to mention the areas where attempts had been made to recreate it were just crude, sloppy, heavy-handed, and well, not very good. But under all of this was a really beautiful painting. Something that deserved care and attention. Something that I knew, my client knew, could be salvaged, reborn, brought back to its former glory. And with a little bit of work, and attention, and care to detail, I think that's the result that we've achieved here. When we look at this painting, we still see an old artwork. It doesn't look brand new, but it doesn't look damaged. It doesn't look like a disaster. And that makes all of the difference. From when the painting came in, a tired, abused, and poorly conserved duplicate, to when it leaves, something that's bright, beautiful, complete, and evokes the power of the original. This conservation has surely given dignity to the duplicate.