The Fourth Miracle Part 3 of 4 - Rebuilding The Painting

The first step in stabilizing and adding a new structural support to this paint layer, this ground layer, which has none because we removed it, is the addition of those two flat-spun nylon gossamer layers that I talked about with Ali last time. I'm using here an acrylic adhesive and I've chosen this because it has really good bonding properties, it is flexible, and it is different than the other adhesives I'm going to use later on. This has a much higher melting point and it is resistant to the solvents that I would use to activate or remove the other adhesives. So this is going to mean that this layer can be reversed or undone, but it will require a different approach than the other layers, thus making disassembly possible. I'm going to use a roller and roll this on the entire back. It has a fairly long open time so I don't need to go terribly quick, even though on the video I am. And then, once the entire piece has been covered, I will take the first layer of nylon gossamer, which is very, very thin. In fact, this is the thinnest available. It comes in multiple different thicknesses or weights. And I will just roll it out onto the painting's back. And then I can just start working it, making sure that it has good purchase, that there are no wrinkles or waves or anything caught in between this layer of gossamer and the paintings itself. Once it's on, I can then add another layer of the same adhesive. This will help bond down this first layer, really pressing it into that texture that was left behind from the canvas. But it will also prepare for the next layer of adhesive, and the next layer of flat spun nylon gossamer. By rolling from the center out, I can ensure that if there are any waves, ripples, or creases, that they are towards the edges and much easier to remove. But really here, the roller is critically important in pressing this very thin layer into the back of the paint layer and allowing it to conform to that texture. Remember, the back of the paint layer was not smooth, and we want really good purchase, so it needs to conform. Once that layer and the adhesive has had a day to dry, I can come back and examine it. And you can see it's almost transparent. It's kind of melted into that ground layer, which is exactly what I wanted. But it's really thin, and some of that texture is still remaining. It's also really thin and not structurally sound enough yet. And that's where a second heavier weight layer of the same flat spun nylon gossamer comes in. And yes, I'm using the exact same adhesive and the same approach, just rolling it out, taking my time to make sure I've got good coverage, and then I will be able to embed that gossamer into this adhesive. This adhesive could be sprayed if thinned out or brushed in this consistency, but I find that using the full thick adhesive gives me the best purchase, and that thinning it out isn't really what I want. Spraying it isn't going to be the right approach, and brushing it gives me an uneven surface that I can avoid by using a roller. So just like last time, while the adhesive is still wet, I will roll out a heavier weight flat spun nylon gossamer. And while this one will conform a little bit to the texture of the ground layer, the canvas texture that was left behind, it's going to be smoother and flatter than the thinner layer. And this is going to mean that we have better purchase with the layer that comes after this, and on top of it. But just like the previous one, I'm adding another layer of adhesive, rolling it out, making sure that it's really, really well bonded. Once that second layer has dried, I can then come back and start removing the facings. And this, I will tell you, is a very nerve-wracking point in this project, because I know what I hope will happen, and I know what I expect will happen, but I just don't know what will happen. I'm going to be using a solvent, and this one will soften up the adhesive that I used to face the painting, but it will not soften up the acrylic adhesive that I used with the flat spun nylon gossamers. This is the point. Once it's been put on the canvas, I'll cover it with some mylar so it doesn't evaporate so quickly, and then I can start rolling back this layer of canvas. And you can see how easily it comes off. This is because it is a conservation-specific adhesive. It's designed to do this. It was formulated so that it could be removed, reversed, unwound, whatever you want to say. This is the process that would happen in the future if somebody wanted to undo the structural treatment. They would first remove the canvas, then the PET film, and then they would be left with the flat spun nylon gossamer layers, which again, are unaffected by the solvent I'm using here to soften up the adhesive. So by using two different adhesives, we can ensure that this whole assembly can be disassembled in the future, and this is a really good proof of concept, just removing this facing, because the acrylic adhesive is getting exposed to all of this solvent in a very high dose, and it's doing nothing. It's not reacting at all, specifically how I envisioned. So what this means is that in the future, if somebody does want to reverse this treatment, it will be okay. They can do it one layer at a time, safely in a controlled manner. Peeling back this facing is not terribly difficult, but there is a lot of adhesive. That was by design, remember, but it just takes a little bit more time, and there's a lot more residue left over. But again, I can come back with some cotton balls, and I can swell up this layer of adhesive. Once exposed to that solvent, the adhesive will absorb it, become swollen, the solvent will then start to evaporate, and I can come back with a cotton ball and begin removing all of this. Sometimes I find that simply rubbing my hand on the surface allows it to come up in little balls, like an old-fashioned school rubber cement, and then I can come back with a shop towel and start removing the excess, and eventually we end up with a painting surface that is clean of adhesive. Now it's time to start preparing some of the other structural layers, and so using the adhesive that I used to face the painting, remember the one that we just took off, I'm going to be putting a layer on the PET film. Now this PET film is really the steel girder, so to speak. It's going to prevent impacts, it's going to stabilize and somewhat immobilize everything. What I'm also adding is another layer of adhesive on a needle punched polyester felt. Now this is about a half a millimeter thick, so really not thick at all, and the reason I'm doing that is because the inventor of this adhesive in early writings wanted conservators to think of it not only as an adhesive, but as a strain relief layer. Because it was flexible, because it didn't transmit vibration, it could be used in thicker quantities to allow movement between two different materials, which is exactly what I want. The problem is that I don't want to just glob it on in an uncontrolled manner, so by saturating that half a millimeter thick felt with the adhesive, I can ensure that I have a thicker layer, but not an overly thick, ridiculous amount of adhesive. Once all of this stuff has dried, I can start assembling it, and that begins first by cutting off the excess flat spun nylon gossamer layers. Now I've measured out the size of my PET film, which is dictated by the size of the new stretcher that I'll be ordering, and I've traced it onto the flat spun nylon gossamer with pencil, and I'm using my cutting shears to remove the excess. I'm doing this now so that I can have a nice crisp and clean edge, which wouldn't be possible if I tried to do it later, because of course this is all going to get bonded down to a piece of canvas. Before assembling the sandwich, I'm going to go over every surface with my hand multiple times to make sure it's smooth and free of debris. Yes, I can use a brush or a vacuum, but I can't feel that, and I want to make sure that any little piece of debris is removed. So onto the back of the paint layer goes the adhesive saturated needle punched felt layer. I'll make sure that we've got good coverage on all the corners. We don't want to have any part of the paint layer adhesive starved. And then, once that's good, I will then align the PET layer on the back as well. Again, I'll make a round, making sure that it's aligned how I want it, making small adjustments, and when it's perfect, I will come back and tack the corners with my iron and a little piece of non-stick mylar, just to make sure nothing sticks to the iron. And then, when that's all done, I can take this and flip it over, and I can do some more trimming. Because remember, we have this piece of adhesive saturated needle punched polyester felt, and we don't need this much. We just need the image area. So using a sharp scalpel blade, I can come back, and using the PET film as a guide, I can just trim off the excess. No measuring necessary here. The blade will run along the edge of the PET film, and that will be the guide like a router would use a bearing on a guide to cut a piece of wood. Once all trimmed up, I can then introduce the canvas layer, which really is just a carrier so that we can stretch it and that it looks good, which has already had a piece of adhesive film tacked onto it. I'm going to, again, tack the assembly all together onto the canvas so that it doesn't shift. This is really just to make sure the registration stays while I'm transporting it. And then, I can bring it back to the hot table for the lining process. I have preheated the hot table so that it is up to temperature and there is no time wasted. And you can see the release film is sitting on the surface of the painting. That will make sure that any adhesive that has oozed through will not cause the top layer of mylar to bond to the face of the painting. And then, I'll wrap it with the cotton webbing, which allows me to extract the air. I'll tape down the top layer of mylar, add my through-bag connectors, and then begin removing said air. Now, I'm going to be using very little pressure here. Once I've gotten the air out, I'll adjust it down to about one mercury inch, which is about half of a psi. So, if you take two sticks of butter, stack them on top of each other, and then stack them tall with the small side, the one inch by one inch square side, that's the amount of weight that's on this painting. Not a lot at all. We just need enough weight to make sure that there's contact because the heat will activate the adhesives. Once the painting reaches temperature, I can turn the heat off and let it cool. And then, once it cools, I can remove it from this mylar on lope and transfer it to the front of the studio where a little bit more work now has to happen. Employing my favorite blue tape, I'm going to mask off the area of raw canvas because I don't want to get it dirty. It's very clean right now and I would like to keep it that way. Once that's done, I can come with some acrylic ground that I have pre-mixed and paint that on the areas that are, well, raw. Now, bear in mind, what we have here is the flat spun nylon gossamer, embedded acrylic adhesive, and that's it. But this needs to be filled in and retouched because I have expanded the image. In looking at this painting, I decided that because so much of it was lost around the perimeter, that cropping it down even more would just destroy the image. Not to mention, there are areas that were important like the hands, the vial, Mount Vesuvius, and the tip of his hat that just felt too constrained and cropped. So I decided that a better approach would be to make it slightly larger. Now, I don't know if that's the actual size, we will never know, but I wanted to restore as much of the image area as possible. Now, once that acrylic ground has dried, I can come back with some of my putty to fill it in because there is a textural difference between the area I just covered with ground and the paint layer. I'm using a very big palette knife here because there's a lot of material to cover, and I'm just kind of layering it on, and then I'll clean it up a little bit later on. Now, once it has had a little bit of time to start drying, when it's not so wet, I can come with some cheesecloth and embed that into the surface because this painting has some texture to it. It's not impasto, but it is the cracking of the paint layer because of the movement of the canvas it was previously painted to, and that's transmitted into a loose grid-like structure on the surface, and so I need to kind of recreate that. And using cheesecloth approximates it pretty well, and I think it will do a good enough job of adding some texture to disguise this new fill-in area. Once all of that fill-in, and you can see there is quite a lot, has been allowed to dry, I can come back with some water and some felt, and I'm using this felt kind of like a sponge. Many, many years ago, I had a contractor working on one of the houses that I previously owned, and there were some old plaster lath walls, and instead of covering it with drywall, he said he could repair it. And so he mixed up a bunch of plaster, layered it on, and then took a big felt pad, dampened it, and began using it to smooth out that plaster. And so I figured, maybe I should try that too. So I stole that technique from him. Anywhere I can steal, borrow, appropriate a technique or a material that's gonna make me better at my job, give my client a better result, and do right by the paintings I'm working on, I owe it to everybody to do so. And here, the felt, with a little bit of water in it, acts as a perfect sponge, allowing me to lift off the excess fill-in without pulling it out of the voids where I want it to stay. Once all of that's removed, I can remove the blue painter's tape and see if I have a nice crisp edge. And lo and behold, the blue painter's tape has done its job, as it is wont to do, and the edge is crisp. Now it is at this point that I'm taking a slightly unconventional approach, but you know, this whole project is really unconventional, so let's stick to the program. And I'm going to be doing some ground retouching. Here, instead of using my standard resin-based retouching colors, I'm using some water-based wash. And I'm creating a little palette on a piece of transparent mylar, laying out some colors that I think I'll need. Some black, some blue, some brown, some red, nothing terribly complicated. And then, with a little bit of water, I'm just going to mix up some close approximations of the colors that are on the painting. These don't need to be super precise, because this is not the final retouching. In fact, nobody will ever see this. But because there is so much white area, I have to do something. The retouching paints I use just will not cover this area efficiently, and it will be so tedious. Not to mention, it just won't look as good on a stark white. So I'm laying down some color fields, just basic blocking of colors, so that there isn't a lot of white. And I'm not trying to create image here, I'm not trying to do retouching, I'm just looking to get rid of the white. Much in the same way that an artist starts off with an underpainting that's very loose. It's not detailed at all. It's done with a big brush, and it's just meant as a guide. Here, using this acrylic paste and this small brush, I can carry through some of the original brushwork across the fill-in medium. I couldn't quite do this with the fill-in and remove it with the felt. So this is an approach that will help me get some texture that I will definitely need to fool the eye when the retouching goes on these areas of fill-in. Now, of course, I have to make some guesses as to what the texture should look like. But here, because there isn't a ton of impasto, it's not terribly difficult. Though, again, it is tedious. Going around and adding texture with this little brush takes time. But time, we have. While all of that texture is drying, it's a good time to assemble the new stretcher support that I have purchased for this painting. The stretcher that came with the painting was not original to it, it was a later edition, probably during the last conservation. And while we would generally keep it, this one was bowed and distorted, and the amount of effort it would take to cut it down, to rebuild it, and to keep it was just more than it was worth, particularly because it had no historical or intrinsic value. So I have procured a new stretcher, and this one is an Italian design because, of course, San Gennaro is an Italian saint. What makes this a little different is the way that the corners are joined, and it's just an Italian way of building a support. And it's not necessarily any better, not any worse, but it's just Italian. And you get the theme here? Right. Once the stretcher has been put together, it's now time to put the painting on the stretcher and marry them. And this is a relatively simple process. Simply lay the painting on the support, and then go around and make sure it's centered. Now, on this painting, we've left a tiny little bit of a gap, about an eighth of an inch, around the entire perimeter of the image to the stretcher. And that's just so that when it gets framed, we can eliminate cropping off as much of the image as possible. Generally, the rabbit, which is what holds the painting into the frame, will cover anywhere up to a quarter or a half inch of the picture. But because this picture goes really right to the edge, we wanted to make sure that we didn't lose any of it. And that's why we've allowed the stretcher to be slightly larger than the actual painting itself. That way, what is holding the painting in the frame isn't the image, it's just the extra material. It will make sense when it goes in the frame. Trust me. And now, it's just a matter of putting tacks into these edges. Now, I don't need to use a lot of tension when stretching this canvas because, of course, it has an interleaf in it, that rigid PET film. So I can pull, but really all I'm doing is trying to make sure that the slack in the tacking edge is taken up and that there's no waviness there. Otherwise, the painting is pretty rigid, pretty stable, and stretching this is pretty easy. It doesn't take a ton of time, even if I'm going slow. And then, once it's all secured onto the stretcher, I can start cleaning up the back. And there's a lot of canvas left over, and we want to tidy it up, make it look nice. And so we start by cutting off the excess in the corners. If we don't do this, it just builds up and it bunches up and it's just too much material. So I'll cut all of these off, going from one corner to the next, and then I will trim down the excess canvas. And here I just use my ruler and the stretcher as a cutting surface and just trim it down. This cleans it up, makes it nice and even, and allows me to fold it over and make sure it looks consistent across the entire back. And I spend a lot of time on the back of paintings because they matter too. Not only is it a way of telegraphing that care was put into every aspect of this conservation, including the back, which really nobody ever sees except me and, well, a few of you people, but it also allows me to take a look at everything. To look at the stretcher, to see how it's stretched, to look at the tacking edge. Just kind of a once-over of the back of the painting to make sure that there are no issues that need to be addressed. And here I'm using a lighter weight tack than I did on the tacking edges because we don't need a heavier tack here. And I'm just going through, folding over, and folding in the corners, making sure everything looks really nice and tidy. And folding in the corners is one of my favorite things to do. It just, I don't know, it's super satisfying to see a tacking edge and a corner come together in a really crisp and clean way. Once all of that's done, it's time to put the keys in. And even though this painting has an interleaf and it's rigid, so it can't be really keyed out, the keys are important because they hold the stretcher together and they prevent the painting from getting slack on the tacking edges. So one key gets tapped in and then I'll go around and do the same with all of the others. Now these are Italian keys for this Italian stretcher and they look kind of funky, right? There's this big fat one with a slot in the middle and then this little skinny one which goes in. And that's just how the Italians did it. Kind of cool actually. Once all of those keys are in place, I will then put some small tacks around them and start feeding the fishing line through these keys which I have previously drilled holes into. And this just makes sure that if the keys come loose, because wood expands and contracts over time, that they won't be lost and they won't fall in between the stretcher bar and the canvas and create a bulge or a dent on the front. So once they've been wrapped around the tack, I'll hammer it in, cut them off, and then we are good to go. The painting is now stretched, the keys are in, it's been keyed out and tensioned, and it's time to prepare it for retouching. Because this painting had so much fill in and because it's a really really old painting, I don't know if it's an old master painting, but it is old, the paint layer is really washed out. And if I were to simply start retouching, well the colors wouldn't match. Now take a look at this. Once I start putting this layer of synthetic resin on the painting, the colors are going to get richer, they're going to get denser, darker, they're going to get saturated up, much like a dried out river rock looks when you get it wet. And then it will enable me to retouch according to those colors. You see this resin effectively is like a first coat of varnish. You can see how much the colors change. When I put the final varnish on top of this resin, the colors won't change. So by retouching according to these saturated, somewhat pre-varnished colors, I can ensure that when I put the final varnish on, my retouching matches perfectly. If I didn't do this, there is the risk that I do a whole bunch of retouching and it looks great while the painting is dry and not varnished. And then I varnish it and it doesn't look so good. And I don't feel good about the project. And I gotta start over. Now once all of that resin is dry, well it's time for retouching. And you can see that there is quite a bit. Even with the retouching I did with the tempera, just to block out the edges with some color, there's still a ton of work that needs to be done. There are massive areas of loss, there are tons of small areas of loss, and there are areas of the painting that are completely missing, like his hand and the vial, which are critically important to understanding this painting. So I have my work cut out for me. And yeah, that means you're going to have to come back next time to see San Gennaro come back together.