The Resistor - Part 2

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. Last time we saw the beginning of the cleaning process and it did not disappoint. After removing that old discolored and heavily oxidized varnish, we saw hints of colors that were just completely hidden before. Blues, greens, pinks, creams, all things that add to the nuance of this painting and demonstrate the artist's excellence. But now we can turn our attention to the main part of this painting, the figure of Saint Sebastian. I mentioned before that I had tested the solvent mixtures that I'm using throughout the painting during the examination process and this is a critical step that all conservators perform. It allows us to gather data about what we want to do to make sure that it's safe for the painting. Another thing that we do to be safe is by working in small sections, organic shapes, and with small swabs. All of these things are designed for maximum control. Not using a large bunch of cotton balls or rags allows us to accurately apply the solvent and have control over where we're moving the swab. Working in a small section, again, allows us to control the and control how long we're working in one area. And by working on organic shapes, it allows us to avoid any hard edges that may happen if we overlap or that defy the natural flow of the content. In addition, by working in one area of color at a time, we can control for any changes that may come with the artist's technique. It seems odd to think that one section of the painting would be more fugitive or fragile than another, but a color like lead white may be more stable than a color like cadmium red, or in this case, like some of the browns and greens, the earth colors, that we can see on this painting. And because I tested this painting, I know that those areas are a little bit more fugitive. I can use a different solvent mixture so that I don't remove any of the paint. Now, the paint I do want to remove is the overpaint, and you can see that area in Saint Sebastian's armpit that has now revealed itself as damage. I got very, very lucky that the overpaint came off with the solvent mixture that I was using, and I didn't have to use a more complicated approach or a solvent gel to remove it. This may be one of the few gifts that this painting has given me, because there are plenty of arrows shot not only to this painting, but to me as well. But this is not a story of my troubles or travails. No, this is a tale of this painting of Saint Sebastian and how it has survived and resisted an onslaught of forces conspiring to forecast its doom. And as we see the painting start to come clean, well, it seems that resistance was worth it. So, while the cleaning of the figure of Saint Sebastian revealed everything we had hoped for, beautiful brushwork, elegant forms, and delicate colors that were completely obfuscated by the old varnish, the side of the painting is where the onslaught of arrows really has done damage. You can see that as I'm cleaning the painting, tons of overpaint is coming off, not just on the seam, but on this whole section of canvas as well. It seems that it was simply glazed over or repainted to make a more unified image. In addition, there is tons of fill-in material on that seam. There is putty, there is oil paint, there is putty on top of oil paint, and oil paint on top of putty. And this was all likely done in an attempt to eliminate the appearance of this seam, which is intellectually understandable. The seam is a visual distraction, but the seam is part of the artwork, and so eliminating it may not be possible. We can certainly do things to mitigate the appearance, like lining the painting face down so any deformations transfer backwards, or varnishing it in a way that this doesn't catch the light, but we can't take extraordinary action like layering on fill-in over the original paint just because we want a smooth surface. That's not acceptable, and that's not how conservation works. So I have to remove all of that. And it's slow going, but it is going. And luckily, I don't have to turn to solvents or other chemicals to remove this oil paint and fill-in. It comes off relatively easily with my scalpel, and so I will keep working mechanically to remove all of this and to reveal the original paint until I'm satisfied that I've gotten everything that I can get safely off of the painting off. As if that level of scraping wasn't another arrow into my heart, there is more. Each and every one of these fly specks has to be removed manually. Unfortunately, after several attempts at removing them with detergents, soaps, and solvents, none proved effective. And that means that I have to go across the painting and manually scrape up and chip off each and every one of these dots, or at least enough of them so that the overwhelming number doesn't seem, well, so overwhelming. It would be impossible to remove every single one, and to some degree that would make the painting look artificially flat, but we need to remove as many as possible to limit the impact on the painting. Now, there are some things for which one must invest an excruciatingly painful amount of time. This scraping, for instance, couldn't be done any faster, and though I can take breaks and space it out over a period of days or several weeks in this case, it still takes a lot of time. But that's my job. I get paid to do this, and I like doing this most of the time. 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So go ahead and check it out. Trust me, it's a lot less painful than scraping for weeks on end. Really, it is. 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. After days and days and days of scraping away all those fly specs, I can finally start thinking about putting the painting back together. And that all begins with filling in the losses. You see, I need to create a base for the retouching. I can't simply just put this retouching paint on these voids because it won't stick. And in addition, the texture will be wrong. And so even if my color matching is spot on, we'll see the light hitting all of these textural differences, and it'll give away that there was some damage there. So by filling these in with this putty, I can ensure that the surface is smooth and regular across the entire painting. But of course, what goes on must come off. And after a day or two, or three or four, because honestly, on a project of this scale, one needs to take some breaks and give their mind, give everything a little bit of space so that it doesn't seem overwhelming. So I think this was probably a week or so later, I can come back and start removing some of this overfill. And I'm doing it with swabs dipped in water and an old sponge that has been cut down and used as a sanding block when dry. It's abrasive enough to remove some of the fill in but not abrasive enough to harm the painting surface. And it's important that I remove as much if not all of the overfill as possible. There are some areas where the overfill is on top of old retouching, but I need to create a basis and a smooth surface. And so some of those areas where I wasn't able to remove all of the retouching because it was just too stubborn, it is okay, and I'm okay with some of my fill in being on top of that, and providing me a base for new retouching that will match and will look better. Cleaning off some of the residues, we can start to see how this painting might come together. But for now, we have to get it onto this new support. The old support was not original to the painting. It was replaced when the last conservation was done, and the original was lost forever. And it was inadequate. It was too lightweight. It was crooked. It was damaged. And yes, I could have saved it, but the amount of time and effort it would have taken to make it an adequate support would have A, cost more than simply replacing it, and B, have provided no actual benefit to the painting. Because it wasn't an original support, there was no reason to keep it. So I chose to have a new support fabricated, custom-built to this painting, sized appropriately, and out of a not-free-clear wood, so that it won't distort over time. And the stretching for this one is made a little bit easier with a new support, because I know that it is square, it is tight, and it's not going to fall apart or shift or contort or twist as I work it. By using my canvas pullers, I can add tension to the painting, and then I can start driving in the tacks on the tacking edge. Keeping the tacks evenly spaced apart not only makes it look nice, which really isn't all that important to people who are looking at the painting, maybe to conservators and people who know inside baseball, but it also helps distribute the tension evenly. If the tacks aren't spaced evenly, when the painting is keyed out, that tension will be irregular, and it could cause distortions, waves, or ripples in the canvas. Once the painting is fully secured to the new stretcher, I can begin trimming off some of the excess canvas. And this is just to make it easier on the next step, and to keep it clean and tidy. I don't want all those frays and little strings on this painting. I'll fold over the excess, and using a lighter weight tack, I will just go ahead and make sure that it is tacked across the back. This provides very little in terms of structural stability, but it looks nice, and I like how it keeps the back of the canvas tidy. I'll fold the corners over and tack them in place too. Now this does provide a little bit of extra support. They are woven together. It's kind of complicated to see, but one edge goes down first, and then the other on top, and then it kind of folds on top of itself. The point is, is that it makes for a very tight corner, so that when I do key the painting out in this step, and I expand the stretcher, those corners don't open up and fray. And that makes for good work. Because of the amount of retouching, and because of the style of painting, and the age of the paint, I'm going to be putting an isolation or saturation layer on before I do any retouching. There's a lot of confusion as to why I do this sometimes, and why I don't. And in this case, it's not necessarily to protect the painting or the paint layer from any of my solvents or retouching paints. It's to provide an accurate representation of what the painting will look like with a final varnish, so that I can do my retouching according to this, and better match my colors. You can see how the painting changes. It gets richer, and the darks get darker. It saturates up, so to speak, or it looks wet. Maybe a good analogy is it goes from mono to stereo, or like in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy walks out and everything is in technicolor. That's kind of the point of this. And it means that when I do my retouching, I can match my colors to this, not the washed out dry painting. Because ultimately, if I did that, and then applied a varnish, well, all the color matching would be wrong, and I'd have to start over again. So this is more of a tool to help me get a better result faster than it is to protect the painting. This painting is very stable and very solid, and it doesn't need any protection. But my retouching could use all the help it can get, because this is going to be a complicated project to retouch. And anything I do that can make my life easier and make the result better, why wouldn't I take advantage of that? I mean, that's kind of the name of the game. Retouching. The moment I have both been waiting for and dreading since I started this project. Waiting for because I love the idea of putting a painting back together. Dreading because it is a lot of work, and there is a lot of retouching to do here. But you start with one step, and then you take a second, and so on and so forward. So I'm going to start in one area that generally comes easy to me, and that's skin tones. And I'm going to mix these colors. These are conservation grade pigments suspended in a synthetic resin, which does not yellow, it stays soluble forever, and makes it so that we can remove this paint if need be, which is a core tenet of conservation, that none of my retouching should be permanent, unlike the last round of retouching which was done with oil paint. Here, on his chest, I'm just going through and trying to touch up all of the big fly specks. I can't touch up every single one of them, because A, I'd just repaint the entire painting, and B, it would mean that I would have to retouch everyone everywhere, and that would be problematic. And more so if I just retouched all of them on the skin, because then his skin would look different than the rest of the painting, and that's not what I want. So I'm going through, and I'm just trying to find the ones that, when I'm sitting about three feet back from the painting, grab my attention, because that's the window by which somebody would view this painting. And knowing that really helps. Now, on a bigger painting, maybe it's five feet away. On a smaller painting, maybe it's a foot and a half, or ten inches. And knowing that kind of basis for how we look at paintings helps me understand what is and isn't problematic, or a distraction. Now, in this area, all of these fly specks are going to get covered up, because they are all really problematic. I tried to scrape them all off, but these were just extra tenacious, and I didn't want to do damage to the painting. In addition, there are some areas that I need to kind of work in where the paint layer has been damaged in the previous conservation. But, as you can see, it starts to come together, and looks pretty good. Now, faces, on the other hand, are one of those areas where we really are going to focus on getting just about everything we can taken care of. Nobody wants to see a blemish on a face, and this is a really well-done face, and it is arguably one of the central features of the painting. So leaving fly specks on this painting, here in the face, may not actually be beneficial. We expect the face to be flawless, and so I'm going to try to work as close to that as I can. Now, I can't retouch every little thing, because, again, that starts to getting into the realm of making editorial decisions, and also the scope of work is just beyond what my client had asked for, or demands. Anytime I have a project with this much retouching, I try to have a very acute conversation with my client about what they need and want, so that I can meet those. Here, by the seam, it gets complicated. Of course, I'm going to retouch all the fly specks, and I'm going to retouch the seam, but how do I bridge the gap between the left, which looks really blue and bright, and the right, which is very dark, brown and almost black in places? And this is a case where I'm going to have to blend in a little bit, and the client and I talked about this, and decided that this was going to be the best approach, at least for the client, because they have to live with this painting. And so other people may decide that a hard seam is fine, but my client felt that that wouldn't be appropriate. It wouldn't live up to their expectations. So I'm giving myself, oh, about a half an inch on either side of the seam to kind of feather out and blend in. Now, this is not going to be a perfectly smooth transition, but what I'm hoping to do is minimize the dramatic change from the left side of the seam to the right side, so that your eye passes over it upon first glance and doesn't get stopped there. Now, of course, if you spend time staring at this, you will get stopped, because it looks kind of unnatural. But the goal is to allow you to see the whole image without focusing on this area of damage, or this area that stands out as being different, right off the bat. Let's give the viewer an opportunity to see the whole painting, and then if they so choose to start discovering little details, then they can process this area. Now, the thumb, on the other hand, needs to be This was clear, and the client was clear about that. It's not terribly difficult. Also, I have other fingers to look at, so, you know, I have something to work from. But it's still a fun and exciting exercise in putting together something that is completely missing. And it's really just about making multiple passes with lots of different colors and trying to see what works and then changing it a little bit, and then changing it back. Maybe a little bit more pink, maybe a little more yellow, and then maybe it's too bright and you have to go back in and darken it, or add, in this case, some fly specks, because part of that just doesn't look right without those little black dots. But when I add them in, well, now our eye can start to pass right over them, and it kind of feels like it should. After all of that retouching, which took me about a week to finish, working every day, oh, anywhere between three and six hours, I'm ready to varnish the painting. Now, this is a synthetic resin varnish. It doesn't yellow, at least in the course of testing in laboratories that's been done on the varnish. It is easily reversible, and it has an ultraviolet inhibitor, so it protects the painting from UV light, too. This is more about giving the painting a final sheen than it is about protecting the piece. This is going into a home where it is going to be safe and protected. So, really, I'm not concerned about stuff getting on the painting or it being exposed to an inhospitable environment. This is about getting that final quality to the something that's going to make this painting glitter and glow. With all of my work now complete, we can finally start to take in the sight of Saint Sebastian as the artist intended us to. And boy, is it a sight. When the painting arrived, it was in a sad condition. Seemingly riddled with the same arrows that punctured Saint Sebastian's flesh, the painting had a litany of problems. Stability issues, a massive seam, flaking, overpaint, fly specks, and it was filthy. But now, after weeks of work, we can start to see the delicacy of the colors. We can see the blood. We can see the whole image without seeing all of the problems. And while this painting presented us with some challenges unique to the construction and the execution of the work, hard work was the key in overcoming those. Areas like the seam have been completely flattened and that awkward transition blended away so that we can enjoy the entire painting. The losses on the right side have been reintegrated so that they no longer stand as distractions. And this painting, like the subject of Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows and left for dead, has been given a new lease on life. Unfortunately for Saint Sebastian, it didn't work out that way, but at least this painting can now live on as the resistor. you