Chris' Crusade - Free Conservation Contest Winner

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. When Chris's painting won the contest for conservation, I was excited for the opportunity to peel back the layers and salvage this painting from an otherwise dim fate. When the painting When the painting arrived at the studio and we began inspecting it, well, my excitement turned cold. Because this project seemed to be growing, getting bigger, more complicated and more challenging the more time I spent with it. And along the way it threw us some curveballs and became a crusade of our own. So this is the point in the video that you're all familiar with where I would stop working and start talking about Squarespace. And I would tell you how easy it is to build a a beautiful, mobile-friendly website with just one click. And with a second click, you can add an e-commerce solution, online scheduling, a gallery, and so much more. And I'm pretty good at it, but I would guess that you're pretty good at it too, having watched a lot of my videos. And since this video was a result of a little contest we did, I thought, why not do a second one? So, go ahead and leave your best Squarespace pitch down below in the comments, and the one that gets the most likes will win a free year of Squarespace on me. So get to commenting! If you're not into contests and you just need a website now, head over to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Baumgartner to get this. Save 50% off your core, plus, or advanced annual or monthly plan. This giveaway is unaffiliated with YouTube or Squarespace and is provided by Baumgartner Restoration. No purchase necessary, and you don't even have to watch the video to leave a comment See the video description for details. I was and am not surprised that Chris's painting won the contest for conservation. Looking at the painting, it's almost hard to see, well, anything, and to imagine that underneath all of this grime, old varnish, or who knows what, that there is a painting. But that is the task at hand, and we are going to approach it, well, with full zeal. The first thing I need to do is start removing all of the stuff from the back of the canvas this so that I can get it onto the hot table for the vapor treatment. And here I'm just removing a piece of paper that presumably was put on as a patch, and I decided to remove this dry as opposed to wet because, well, I thought it would be easy enough and I didn't want to add moisture to the canvas and start distorting it while I still have other work to do. Sometimes we remove things wet, sometimes dry, there's really no set rule, it's just what's going to work best for the current situation. Now this one on the other hand played very nicely and came off easily. I wish that was the case for all of them. I'm going to clean off the back of this canvas with the brush just removing all of the accumulated dust and dirt and particulate and remnants of the patches that I removed. And then once I've gotten all of that stuff off I'm going to take the painting and I'm going to transfer it over to the back of the studio to the small hot table. I'm going to be doing what we call in the studio a vapor treatment, which is kind of a misnomer. I'm going to be using moisture, heat, and pressure all in conjunction to soften up, relax, and flatten the canvas fibers and then to set them in a new, flat, dry state. Before I put this painting on the hot table, I'm going to add some moisture. Generally we can rely on the ambient humidity and moisture that's in the painting from the environment, but here because the canvas is so crinkled and crunched and folded and really dry and brittle, I'm spraying a little bit of distilled water onto the back. And then onto a new acid-free blotter paper, I'll lay the canvas down. And then I'll start preparing it for the treatment. And the first step is to wrap the perimeter with cotton webbing, to install through-bag connectors, and then to tape down a piece of mylar creating an airtight envelope. I'll install the vacuum hoses, turn on the vacuum pressure and the heat, and suck out all of that air. This is going to create the downward pressure that's going to hold the painting flat. Now because this painting is so crinkled, I'm taking a roller and a bone folder and I'm just kind of working out some of the larger creases. For paintings that are really smooth we don't need to do this, but sometimes a little bit of extra help goes a long way. It's a nice assist for the vacuum. Once the painting has heated up, then been allowed to cool, I'll come back, turn off the heat, turn off the vacuum, and then remove the painting from this airtight envelope. I've switched to using blue painter's tape because it leaves less residue on the table, peels off easily, and is much much cheaper than the other tape that I used. It's almost shocking that it's taken me nearly 20 plus, I don't know, almost 30 years to switch to this, but you know, we can always learn new things. Even an old dog can learn new tricks. Sometimes. I'm gonna lift up this painting from this blotter paper, and you can see it's stuck a little bit, but not terribly so. If I had real concerns about this canvas sticking to the blotter paper, I would have used a release layer in between, but I didn't think it was going to stick, so I didn't use it. And luckily, I got lucky. I'm going to reuse that blotter paper, but flip it over, and then put the painting on a piece of sheetrock or drywall or gypsum board. And then lay down some felt to protect the surface and then drop another layer of sheetrock on top of it. This is going to create downward pressure, not as much as the vacuum table, and allow any ambient or residual moisture that's in the canvas to be absorbed and transmitted into this gypsum board and dry the painting completely. This will ensure that when I eventually take it out of the weights and remove it, it is nice and flat, and then we can move on to cleaning. Now I knew this painting was very, very, very, very, very dirty. Did I mention it was dirty? There was a lot of surface grime on this painting, and so I made a pass with my Neutral Organic Soap, which is a soap that we mix here in the studio that's designed to break down particulate, dust, grime, dirt, oils, just the stuff that sits on the surface of the painting. It's also actually a really good soap to clean our hands with. Because it is neutral pH and organic, it's actually pretty kind and gentle on our skin. As I'm moving through and cleaning off this painting, you can see I'm making big, big passes here because there is so much grime and so much old varnish and surface coating on here that I don't really need to be all that delicate. I'm not getting to the paint layer with the Neutral Organic soap. But you can see that the image is starting to come out. We can start to see that this is a portrait of the queen, and we are starting to see some details. They're obviously still very obscured with that old varnish, but it's getting better, and that's what we want, even if it's slow going and a lot of steps. As long as we're moving towards progress, that's where we need to keep going. Now, if the client had wanted to preserve the old varnish, we could stop here and leave it. The neutral organic soap, once removed, has no residue and will preserve the old varnish. And we have had clients in the past tell us they want just this. More often than not, we can convince them to remove the old varnish, but it is possible to just remove surface grime to clean the painting without removing the old varnish, which is a separate step. Removing varnish is not cleaning a painting. Now when it comes time to removing the old varnish, I've settled upon using a solvent gel. I made several tests and determined that this was going to be the best approach. So I will apply this solvent gel and I will agitate it with my bristle brush, let it sit a little bit, let it do its magic, break down the surface coatings, and then I'll come back and remove it with a swab. But we can see clearly not all of it's been removed. So I'm going to make another pass with the neutral organic soap, just in case, and then another pass with the solvent gel. While I'm letting it sit, I'll move on to another area of the painting. The solvent gel works by breaking down the bonds of the surface coating. And the more oxidized, the more polymerized the surface coating is, the longer it takes and the harder it is. And sometimes The only answer is multiple passes, so while I'm letting that section of white sit, I will start another section and then start another section. It's just a little bit more time efficient. But ultimately I'm still not satisfied, so I'll use some mechanical approach and I'll scrape off some of the varnish, which is better but still not great. There's still a lot of yellow left on the painting. Which means a fourth pass. And on the white, this is sustainable because it's really durable, but on some of these other colors, I have zero faith that they could tolerate four passes of solvent gel and scraping. Which means I'm not going to be able to clean this painting, unless I come up with a different approach. So when all of the traditional techniques for removing surface coatings have failed, we are left with a massive question. And the answer is often the laser. And I'm turning to my old laser here. Yes, I have a new one, but I haven't read the manual, so I don't quite know how to work it just yet. I'll figure it out, but for now, Old Faithful is up to the task. This is an Er:YAG laser, and that's erbium-yttrium-aluminum-garnet laser. And all that means is that it emits a concentration of light at a very specific wavelength. And that wavelength targets OH bonds. And luckily for us, varnishes and linseed oil have a high concentration of OH bonds. And unlike some rust removal lasers that we've all seen on the internet, this laser isn't going to zap this surface coating away, leaving a perfectly clean surface. No, in fact, what it's going to do is just compromise those OH bonds in the surface coating, and then make it easier for us to remove that surface coating with traditional techniques. So this laser is just one tool along a multi-step process. Because we want all of that energy concentrated at the surface, where the surface coating is, and not at the paint layer, we're going to wet out the surface. And this can be done with water, with alcohols, with acetones, with mineral spirits, with any number of solutions. It's really just what works on this particular painting. And then we'll start off with a A low pulse and low kilojoules setting and make a first pass. And you can see that the varnish is still on the surface. It hasn't just vaporized, but coming back with a little bit of distilled water, you can see how easy it is to remove. And yeah, that's distilled water. Remember, it took four passes of solvent gel to get to this point. One pass with the laser and a swab of distilled water. So this is what we're gonna do. Wet out, make a pass, remove. And we'll have to modulate the laser's strength and pulse width according to what color we're using and what pass we're making. Perhaps the first pass is stronger and they get weaker as we get closer to the surface of the painting. But you can see that we still have to make multiple passes. The laser is not a perfect tool, and just like the solvent gel, we have to repeat this procedure over and over again. Now you may notice that occasionally there are little fireballs. And yes, that's correct. You heard me right. There are little fireballs. Because I'm using a solvent here to wet out the surface, that solvent evaporates. And because I'm using a laser to emit a highly concentrated beam of energy, there is heat. And heat plus solvent vapors often results in little fireballs. Yeah, it's not a great thing. I mean, I don't like it. And the first time I saw it, it scared the daylights out of me. But I've learned to control for it, and as you can see, as I make more passes, there are less fireballs. So, now you know. But you can see that the laser isn't perfect. Even with, what, four passes here, there's still a lot of old surface coating left. So I'll come back with the scalpel, and I'll start scraping them off. But they have been compromised, so the scalpel works much more easily than it does without the laser. I'm really effectively just dragging the scalpel across the surface. I'm not using any pressure other than the weight of the blade and the handle. And there is a fairly clean painting. Yes, there's still some residue and still some retouching to do, but it's much better than where we started. The laser is a fantastic tool, and I'm very fortunate to have two of them and have some experience learning how to use them and working with them. But it is also a very tedious tool. The laser is about 8mm circular, and the painting is just a little bit larger than 8mm circular. So it's a very slow process. And as we've seen, I need to make multiple passes. So it takes a ton of time. Removing the old surface coating from this painting took several weeks. I'll work for an hour, then go do something else, then come back for 30 minutes, then Then go do something else, so on and so forth. My assistants took turns working on this painting, everybody in the studio got some time with this painting, and it took tons of time. I can't even recount how many hours went into removing this coating. And that's why using the laser isn't our first choice. It is just so tedious and so time consuming, and ultimately so expensive, that if there is another way of removing the surface It is always preferable. But ultimately, if all of those other options fail, then we're left with just one answer. And that answer is the laser. Now one thing that's really interesting and not surprising about the laser is it's just a tool, just like a scalpel or a suite of solvents. And so it has to be adjusted according to the facts on the ground. Some areas of this painting, like the white, are more durable, and so they can take a higher pulse width or higher kilojoule setting. But some other areas, like the reds or the greens or blues — yes, those colors do exist on this painting, you'll see them eventually — might might require a more mild approach. After removing the varnish and surface coating on the majority of the painting, I have now finally come to her face, the part about which I am most excited. And with just a couple of passes, I can already see the change. The colors that were completely obscured by this heavy coating are now revealing themselves, and I'm getting very excited for what's to come. One thing that we may notice is that I'm avoiding the areas on the painting with a lot of black. Because black paint often contains a lot of carbon, which in turn often has a high concentration of OH bonds, that paint could be more susceptible to absorbing the energy from this laser and compromising those bonds, and that would result in the black paint being removed, a result that we certainly want to avoid. So I'll avoid those areas with the laser and come back with my scalpel and some solvents to try to remove as much of the yellowed surface coating as possible. But if there was one area where some of the surface coating residue had to remain, the black is certainly more preferable to the white. I've mentioned multiple times that using the laser is always full of compromises, and this is just one of them. There is also no singular way to properly conserve a painting. There are multiple avenues to success, and using the laser in conjunction with mechanical and solvent-based cleanings may be the right approach. It is clear that this painting will need quite a bit of retouching, but I'm actually kind of excited about that step. After spending so many hours taking her apart, I'm looking forward to putting her back together. But ask me if I feel the same way when I'm on hour 45 of retouching. I may have some feelings then. When it comes to the eyes, which I always leave for last, it's always a special moment. Because this is the first thing we see. This is the point of contact. And this is the area, by way of oil paint and the artist, that we can connect with the sitter, feel who she was, and get to know her. After what felt like years of removing old varnish with the laser, hearing that laser pulsing on and off for hours at a time, we are finally done and ready to move on to the structural work. There were large areas of this canvas that were completely missing. In fact, multiple corners were just gone. So I've turned to my stock of old canvas, and I found one that matches the weave and weight and kind of the wear. It's a little frayed on the ends, and I think that that's going to fit with this painting really well. And then it's time to cut out that inlay. I could use the laser, my other laser, but here it's pretty easy and it's a large piece with not terribly complicated cuts, so scissors work fine. Plus, I don't want to hear the word laser for a very, very long time. Once I'm satisfied with the inlay, I can tape it in place with some archival acrylic tape. This will be removed later on. This is just to hold it in place temporarily. And then I can proceed on to the next step, where I prepare this painting for the interleaved lining. Of course, with massive tears and massive inlays, we have to add a structural support that is more than just a soft lining. Otherwise, those areas where we've inlaid might tent up or move over time. The interleaf keeps them flat, keeps them stable, and for a canvas like this that's pretty compromised, the interleaf is the right choice. Before applying the adhesive, I'm going to lay down a piece of very thin, flat-spun nylon gossamer. This helps compensate for the textural difference between the original canvas and the smooth PET film. It allows a little bit more adhesive, and it allows a greater surface contact between those two materials, which ensures a better bond. I'm using the adhesive that I always use for linings. This is a conservation-specific adhesive that is both heat and solvent activated, and it is reversible and removable with both heat and solvent. So this technique is not permanent. In the future, if somebody wanted to undo this, they could. In addition to coating the painting, I'm going to coat the PET film on both sides. And then, once all of that is dry, I can begin assembling the sandwich of new linen, Adhesive film, PET film, and canvas. I'll iron this film out, making sure not to create any creases or wrinkles. I'll align the PET film with the canvas after trimming it down, and then I'll put the canvas on the new canvas and tack it into place so it doesn't move as I transfer it over to the hot table. I've cleaned the surface of the table of all residues. I'll lay the painting down onto it, and then I'll put a couple of layers of release film on top of the painting, wrap the perimeter of the painting with cotton webbing, Lay down my through-bag connectors, seal up the outer mylar, and then begin extracting the air. I'll turn on the heat, set the temperature, and then we can start the lining process. As the air is extracted, it creates pressure down on the surface of the painting. As the table heats up, it activates the adhesive. As the painting cools, that pressure and the adhesive bond everything together. I'll use my little rollers just to make sure everything is down and there's good contact. And then once the table has cooled, I can turn off the vacuum pump and remove this painting from this envelope. And then we have a fully interleaved lined painting. And you can see it's nice and flat and smooth and not stuck to anything. I can then take this painting over to the front of the studio and begin the arduous task of filling in all of these losses. This painting had a lot of them. There was a lot of missing paint flakes, there were some tears, there were some holes, and of course there were the large areas that I had to inlay. I'm using a chalk-based filler here just to compensate for the textural losses and I'm overfilling. I'll come back and remove all of the excess later on. It's much easier to do it this way than it is to try to be super precise on the fill-in because even that way there's still going to be a lot that needs to be removed. Now once all of this has been applied, it needs a little bit of time to dry and then I can come back and remove all of that excess. And here I'm just using some warm water and some felt. Because this painting is really smooth and doesn't have a lot of impasto, a textural buildup of oil paint, I can remove it fairly easily with this felt. If this were a very textured painting, this approach wouldn't work. But even still, I have to come back with some swabs and clean up the residues. But the felt does make quick work of these large areas, and it means that I can get to retouching a little bit faster. But before retouching, I have to marry this painting to its support. And here we've had to order a new support because the painting came without one. We've measured the painting and we've had a custom-built support made, and now we are going to align the painting onto the support and stretch it. The question of why we use a stretcher when the painting has an interleaf comes up time and time again. And so I will answer that question, and probably again. Even though the painting is effectively immobilized with the PET film, the interleaf, there is still area on this painting that doesn't have a rigid substrate, like the tacking edges, and those areas are flexible and will expand and contract with humidity changes. And those areas of slack can create waves and ripples on this canvas, and those waves can put stress on the bond, and that can weaken the bond. So by making sure that we have tension all the way around the painting, we can remove that potential compromise to the work we've done. Now once it's all aligned and all stretched we can remove all of the excess just trimming off some of this canvas and then begin the process of tidying up the back which is probably one of my favorite things to do because it's fairly easy and it looks really good. It's nice when some of your work is low effort and high reward which in this field doesn't come very often so we'll take a win wherever we can get it. Once we've stretched the painting, it's now time for the keys, and these will expand the stretcher just a little bit to take up any of the slack that's in the tacking edge. The keys also help keep the stretcher from opening up and getting loose as the wood expands and contracts with the movement changes. Also, if ever somebody wants to remove the interleaf, now they have a perfectly good stretcher to use. So you're welcome, future conservator. Once everything is done, we can feed fishing line through these keys and then bind them in place so that they don't get lost or get wedged in between the canvas and the structure. And then it is time to do the final step in preparing this painting for retouching, and that's the application of the synthetic resin coating that we often call the isolation layer. Now because this painting was so washed out and dry and because it has so much retouching and fill-in, this is really critical. You can see how the colors saturate up and get richer when we apply this resin coating. When the final varnish is applied to this painting, the colors will not change. And this means that we can retouch according to what the final painting will look like. When I mix my retouching paints and put them on wet, they'll match. They might dry a little bit lighter, but then when we apply the final varnish, they too will saturate up and everything will match again. For my first foray into retouching this painting, I'm going to choose an area that is one color, relatively small and relatively easy, and that is the blue. A color that I didn't even know existed on this painting when it came into the studio. I mean, it didn't. The painting was so grimy, dirty, and covered with old surface coatings that we couldn't even see this blue. But now here it is, bright and brilliant. And with a little bit of retouching, I think it looks exquisite. Now, one of the difficulties with retouching a painting like this that is so damaged is knowing when to stop. Because I really, really want to make this painting look beautiful, but I don't want it to not look like itself. This is an old painting, after all. And so there's always this balance between knowing how much is enough and how much is too much. And unfortunately, the only way to know that is to do thousands of hours of retouching, to the point where you get a feel for what's right. I'm just going through and trying to get rid of the majority of the damage while still leaving enough that it blends in with the other areas. We don't want to retouch one spot so much so that it looks different from the rest. And here on the hand, which suffers not only from damage, but from some previous skinning and also some clunky painting, the temptation is to repaint it to make it look better. But that's not what we're doing here. We're just trying to remove the damage and make it look whole, make it look like it fits and belongs within the rest of the painting. So I have to resist the urge to correct the mistakes of the artist and to make this hand as beautiful as I know I could if I were painting it from scratch. Here on her chest. Perhaps another conservator would take a wide brush and glaze in the whole area, make it unified, make it smooth and beautiful, add some shadows, give her some contour, and make it gorgeous. But that would be inappropriate. That would be taking too many liberties. Here what I'm trying to do is just remove the damage and make it look like it's part of the painting, of the same language and lexicon as the rest of the painting, so that when we, you, See the painting. It just feels right. Not one part looking better than the others, not one part looking worse, but them all having the same volume, tone, and temperature. And when it comes to her face, this is clearly the most exciting part. This is the part that we all want to see and to look at. And getting to put it back together, getting to remove all of this damage, and to see her skin come back together is just super exciting. I never thought that this portrait would be hiding underneath all of that old varnish and the grime, but here it is. And though it does take a lot of retouching, I think it's worth it, because at the end, when we see this painting as a whole and we no longer see the damage or the old grime, well, that's when we will be able to see the artist's skill. And to have an experience that is free of contamination, free of what-ifs, To have an experience that is just pure and visceral. This retouching took so many hours. I think I mentioned earlier to check in to see how I was doing on hour 40. Well, I'm done. I cannot bear to do any more retouching. And I'm lucky that my assistant stepped in to pick up some of this load because I was losing my mind. But now that all of this retouching is done, it's time for the final varnish. And here I get to decide on the final sheen and make this painting look exquisite. I'm brushing this varnish on because it's a small enough painting and because I want a little bit glossier of a varnish that I can knock down with the bristles on the brush. Varnishing is fairly easy but of course I've done it thousands of times. It's simply a matter of getting the varnish on the surface and then evening it out. And here I use a large bristle brush because inevitably when the bristles fall out they're easier to pick up than something like a hake or finer brush. It's large, it gives me a lot of surface area, and it allows me to texture the varnish as the solvent evaporates and the resin dries, which is precisely what I'm doing here. And what I think will make this painting look phenomenal. I've spent the last 24 hours just staring at this painting off and on. I can't believe the condition it's in now and that it's viewable because it certainly wasn't before. It has sat for three or four years in a box under a bed with an unknown fate until I saw Julian's post on Instagram wanting... wrecks of paintings that people weren't certain could be salvaged and I certainly felt that this one would qualify. I was thrilled when he chose it as one of the three finalists and just amazed that it got selected because you couldn't see much from the post. Of course, it looks sort of like a dried-up piece of leather almost. It was just so dark and all of this Color and beauty was hidden underneath all of that. It was amazing. In the future, the hopes will be that some institution will want to take this canvas and the other one, at least keep them intact, if not get it restored sometime in the future. But we'll take these so that they're accessible to future scholars studying. And Julian, if I win the lottery, the other canvas is coming right back to you. Who would have thought? That when this painting arrived at the studio, in the condition it was in, that this is what would be leaving. Not me. I knew that there was a beautiful painting underneath. I have faith that that is always the case. But I had no idea that this is what would be revealed. That all of these colors would still be there. That there would be this much detail, and that the painting would come together so perfectly. I guess my hat tip goes to Chris, who did see something in this painting, and took a gamble, took a chance on purchasing it, and another chance on submitting it to our little contest. And another hat tip goes to you, the audience, for selecting this painting, for throwing me a challenge among challenges, because you too believed that there was something special in this painting, and that I was up to that challenge. And now, with all of the work complete, well, it just looks like a painting. All of the planar distortions are gone, the tears, the rips, the missing canvas, all of that surface grime, all of the old varnish and linseed oil have been removed, and we can now see a rainbow of colors, of detailed brushwork, of details that just didn't exist previously. And the painting just feels like itself. And we can get lost in the artist's vision. The transformation of this painting may be one of the greatest that has ever come out of this studio. It is simply remarkable. And while it required heaps of faith, of trust, and of labor, this project is no longer just Chris's crusade, but all of ours.