A La Carte

Hi everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today's my birthday and I am celebrating with you guys with an amazing painting. It's on the bench, I've been dying to get to it for months and months and months and today is the day. So I am pleased to share this painting with you and let me just tell you it will not disappoint. So let's crack on and make a start on this picture. So here it is, resplendent, ready to be unravelled. Yeah, I can't wait to show you what's inside. Let's make a start. I'm being super careful here for a reason, because this picture has a section that I'm quite concerned about. So this is what we've got. They've done a great job packaging. So we've got this nice bit of foam in there. We've got some paper on that section. We've got this and this says loose canvas piece within. I know what's coming, you guys don't. Okay, let's just take that off. I'm scared to show you. Let's do this. I'm scared. Look at that. Oh my God. This is it. So this is the piece. This is the impact. This is the damage. This is the destruction that's coming your way. I saw this painting on auction and the first picture didn't look too bad. It looked okay and then the second picture I was like, oh my God, look at this. So as you can see, it's got massive piece missing and hopefully it's nice and secure in that envelope. But this is going to be one of those paintings and yeah, you guys are here for the journey. Right, let's flip it over carefully. I'm gonna put that foam back in and see how it looks. It's upside down. I'm a little bit scared. There's my signature. Brilliant. Okay, so here it is. This is your first view of the painting and the damage. It's by famous marine artist John Wilson Carmichael and it's been through the wars. It's extremely dirty. That looks like nicotine or smoke staining. It's had several impacts. It's got a massive section missing. It's just been mistreated, shall we say. But I love marine paintings and when this popped up, I could not resist. So there's our signature, John Wilson Carmichael, and this is what we've got to contend with. This painting has been well and truly shipwrecked. Looks like it's been attacked by the Kraken or something like that. It's just come along and ripped out that whole part of the ship and the painting. That poor little guy, he's just sat there in his fishing boat going, oh my God, what's happened here? Right, let me see what the missing piece looks like. This is nice. What does that say? James, hoping this is for YouTube restoration, as I would love to see this as the artist intended. Long-term subscriber here. Trust the packing is up to standard. Best wishes, Sarah. Packing and post-sale logistics. Well, Sarah, your packing is absolutely exceptional. Let's see how well you've done with this envelope, but yes, thank you. Yeah, and I will let you know where we're up to with this as we carry on. Cool. You can have some free advertising there, Sarah. Loose piece of canvas. Okay, so she's left that so I can just undo that, which is good. Let's put pressure on there. What am I going to do with this? Let me come out. Okay, nice, nice. Whoa, here we go. There's our missing piece. Even the missing piece is battered. Oh my God. Oh, dearie me. Look at these little guys here waiting. Save me. Holy smokes. What have I got myself involved in here? Okay, so today's Monday and I was hoping to, you know, maybe because the last episode went so well as a start to finish in one complete restoration in one episode, I thought, yeah, maybe we can do this. Just one full restoration. I think this, this might be a multi-part series. We will see. There's going to be a lot to do on this picture and I'm slightly terrified, but no, do you know what? We've got, we've got the missing piece. We've got all that original canvas there. I know who the artist is and this is just going to be fabulous. I can't wait to get started on this. So let's, let's get a bit of a plan together. Let me plan out what we're going to do with this picture. Okay, so we're going to prepare the loom. We're going to use some high quality Belgian linen, which we're going to size with rabbit skin glue to protect it. I'm going to remove the painting from the stretcher carefully. I need to bear in mind that I've got lots of loose paint and loose fibres. I'm going to use an adhesive on the linen that'll allow me to put the painting directly on face up, so I can realign everything. Once it's in position, I'll be able to add that missing piece and match up those fibres and make sure everything's in the right order. Make sure everything lines up perfectly. And it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand. If I can find one, I will use one. Voila, all done. That's my plan. And once I've done that, I will match up threads, realign on vacuum table, fill and read such, hoe and clean. So loads to do on this painting. Right, so that's my basic plan for this picture. So the first thing I'm going to do is get my Belgian linen out and prepare the loom. James Wilson Carmichael, also known as John Wilson Carmichael, was a British maritime and landscape artist who painted in oil and watercolours. Based in Newcastle upon Tyne and later in London, he was a household name in his lifetime and his work remains some of the most desirable in the marine art market. He was described by art historian Jeremy Maas as a sea painter of great, though sometimes uneven, natural talent. He went to sea at a young age and spent three years sailing between ports in Spain and Portugal. After returning home he was apprenticed in his father's trade to a local shipbuilding firm. Upon completion of his apprenticeship he devoted all his spare time to art and eventually gave up the carpentry business, setting himself up as a drawing master and miniature painter. By 1831, when Carmichael was living in Blackett Street, Newcastle, he had 18 works of art included in the annual exhibition. When he moved to London in 1846 he had already established a reputation as a skilled maritime artist. During the Crimean War he was sent to the Baltic to make drawings for the Illustrated London News and his painting of the Bombardments of Sveborg, I think that's how you pronounce it, was exhibited at the Royal Academy and is now in the collection of the National Maritime Museum. Two of Carmichael's works, Captain Cook in the Tropical Regions and Captain Parry in the Polar Regions, attracted the attention of Queen Victoria when she visited an exhibition in Westminster Hall. William Bell Scott noted that he earned a good deal of money from the sale of smaller paintings which were in high demand. And I think this painting that we've got must be one of those smaller paintings. So if you look through his catalogue you can see some very dramatic scenes, lots of boats, lots of full sails like this one. And then there are also just kind of flat-on or more documentary paintings and I think this is what we've got. So it might be an actual ship or it might have just been one of his later paintings that he was making, like a pot boiler, to provide some income. So it'd be nice to delve a little bit more into that and see if we can identify that ship. So the next thing I need to do is apply the adhesive. As I've mentioned before I am experimenting with different glues and adhesives at the moment. This is a hot melt adhesive. It will go off but then it is heat activated as well. So my plan is to remove the painting from the stretcher and then place this onto the loom, onto the adhesive. Now I don't want to use a facing paper because I have to match up that missing section. So if I have a facing paper on top of it I won't be able to match up the missing section correctly. The other thing I've got to contend with is there is lots of loose fragments of paint as well. The paint surface is extremely fragile and if I was to attempt to remove the tacks and pull off the painting from the stretcher I could lose more of that loose paint. You can see how it's just ready to flake off. So this method was the way I was taught over 20 years ago and I remember the first time that I saw it I was terrified and I thought, oh you want me to cut the painting off the stretcher? But when I was shown how to do it safely and the correct procedure it is a very safe way to remove a painting from the stretcher. Now we do these days try to save tacking edges as much as we can where there's no damage to the paint surface and we want to preserve as much as possible. In this instance though that paint surface is fragile. There's loose fragments that are barely hanging on to the weave of the canvas and if I was to start removing those tacks and putting the whole painting under pressure and tension I could lose more. So with the edges safely cut now I can gently flip that painting over and remove the stretcher bars from the painting plane and you can see already the amount of dirt and dust that has been trapped there. You can see it released on the bench so you get a better view of that once I just remove this carefully. If you get it off that felt. So once that's removed now I can then start to tackle the back of the painting and clean all that dust and dirt. But what's interesting with this painting is that the bottom edge is usually where all the dirt is collected but on this one for some reason it's not on that bottom edge it's all on the side edge so this has been stored or stacked on its side for there's got to be a hundred years worth of dirt on there. So I think the damage is fairly recent but for whatever reason this has just been stored on its edge for easily a hundred years to collect that much dust and dirt. So I'm going to use my little conservation vacuum now and just suck up as much of that as I can. A bit of a pine needle there or something. But yeah you can see how much dirt and filter is on there. So I'm just going to clean this up now and get ready for the next section where I'm going to apply it to the adhesive. With the back cleaned and my adhesive on the loom I'm now going to transfer this painting to the loom. So I've got some like non-stick melonex either side and I've created like a little bit of an envelope. So again I'm trying to minimize the number of times that I do flip the painting over. So this is like a sandwich the card supports the paint surface and then almost like a magician I'm going to carefully remove that release film and the painting will just sit nicely on top of that adhesive ready for the next treatment which will be to gently tack it to there using a heated spatula. So just carefully remove that from there and then I can line this up to sit nicely onto the adhesive. So at this stage now I feel like we really are starting to get this painting back together and I can see what work is involved. So I've got lots of long loose fibres that are going to need to be trimmed. I've got areas that are kind of raised and dinted that'll need relaxing. Those long fibres will need to be trimmed. So yeah we're on and it's looking good. Thank goodness I've got the missing piece just looking at that there imagine if you didn't have that and you were having to come up with all that extra work. But anyway so I'm quite pleased that we have the painting on the adhesive on the linen on the loom which is good I think that's one of my I think I can tick a few things off my list now. So my next thing to do is with a little bit of heat now is reactivate that adhesive and start to lay down the fibres in the place where I want them to be and also offer up the missing piece as well. So I'll be attaching that over the top making sure it all lines up and then I'm gonna I think my plan is to use a heated spatula and just gently activate that adhesive and get it in place before it gets ready to go onto the vacuum table. So yeah not a bad bit of progress and yeah let's see what that looks like with the piece on now. Okay so this is the controller for the spatula and I've set that at 64 degrees which will reactivate the glue and all these little fibres at the end I'm just going to trim off. So I'm just carefully going to remove those so that when my missing piece lines up I haven't got all these fibres in the way. Shorter fibres I can kind of try and match up as best as possible and line up so that they do join but what I don't want is any of these fibres sticking on top of the painting when it goes onto the vacuum table. So yeah I'm just going to trim all those up and you can see here that the parts of the painting are still sort of attached to those fibres so where I can save those I will and then once I'm happy with that section I'll lay over some melonex and then I apply the spatula to the paint surface and I'm just gently warming that and then the adhesive will soften and attach to the old canvas and it'll also impregnate through a little bit and attach any loose paint so I'm just carefully going around all the sections and the opening shall we call it and just laying those down and tacking them on. These big long strands there's nothing I can do with those so they'll have to go and as I say any small little bits that are kind of like three mil or something like that they can be tidied up and matched across but any of these loose ones there's not an awful lot I can do with those so again just gently trim those off and then we'll offer up that missing piece so you can see there that section in the middle is just barely holding together what I'm going to try and do I've got I'm going to use the rigging as a guide to line up those sections and just make sure everything's where it should be so there's quite a lot to go on it's like just putting a jigsaw piece in but yeah I'm going to look at all those little sections there make sure it all kind of lines up if I've got the boat on the left hand side in order and the horizon line on the right that should be okay and then I'll check the rigging at the top left hand corner and see how that looks I can also use my magnifying loom just to have a closer look and again what I'm looking for here is just seeing those brush strokes and seeing if they carry and match up on the two sections so we've got this shadow on the sail and that appears to line up nicely so that part of the painting seems to line up in order this is the boat's hull again I'm looking at that top line there seems to match through even though it's a little bit broken and then I've got this area here that seems to line up quite nicely as well and then on the sail that looks pretty good too so all those fibers that I've trimmed down they do match up now as well which is nice this is the little fishing boat now there's a little bit of a boom arm there that looks a little bit low this section here looks a little bit low so there must be something quite not right with how I've lined that up so I think that could be to do with this damage in the middle you see how it's separating so that if that's not lined up properly it's going to be at an angle so I need to make sure that lines up at the right angle so I need to get those distances right so there is paint loss but it looks like there's like a millimeter or so there so that boom on the boat I don't know if it's the boom I'll have to get more technical in my boat terms but that seems to line up better there which will hopefully make the rest of it line up too at the bottom so that rigging lines up nicely this section needs trimming and tidying there's so much damage to that piece this these all need trimming and tidy but that lines up better now that little dude there on the back lines through nicely and the horizon line lines up as well and this section is going to need a little bit of a trim too and that might need flattening as well so we're in place which is good right so I've got quite a good matching areas there now I've got probably bits in the ship's hull the masts and the sails that all line up that little fisherman's boat the end of the boat matches up there so I feel like I've got that in a good place now so now I'm just going to spend the time organizing those loose fibers at the end of the tears laying them flat trimming where necessary and then trying to match up and weave as best I can to kind of get them nice and flat because once that goes onto the vacuum table onto the heated table I don't want anything protruding or sticking out I need to have a very flat surface for it to fully weld or join together once I put it on the table so I'm going to probably have to spend the next few hours doing that to line it up before it goes on the heated table but it looks better almost in one piece but I'm just realising how much retouching and filling and restoration there is going to be but this is it onwards this is the nature of the beast right I'm going to carry on doing that this part here has got a raised dint or yeah it's got a dint in there that's not laying down flat so if I try and attach that with the spatula it's going to cockle and it could crease so I need to apply a little bit of moisture to that area and to do this I'm just going to use some blotting paper and cut a small piece apply some moisture and lay that underneath the canvas and this will just relax that section of the painting it'll just allow those fibres to kind of expand and that corner to lay flat so that I can attach it so again this is just like a local little bit of a treatment it only takes a second or two to do but it will just give a better finish on that corner so I'm just going to gently put in that moistened paper put my melonex over the top there's a little bit of a barrier seal and then I'll just allow that moisture to slowly relax that part of the canvas I can use a little bit of heat if I want to I can just allow that spatula to go over the top but just the moisture on the paper will be enough just to let that dent come out and soften so I can attach it to the adhesive so this is after about I don't know 15 minutes or so and you can see that it's a lot flatter now that dent's gone and I can now flatten that down and attach it to the loom and there you can see that it's nice and flat now that dent's gone and it's allowed me to attach that and start to join that bottom section up sometimes you get a bit of a rogue fibre coming through so the blade's good just to tidy those sections up so I'll go and make sure there's nothing protruding that will affect the vacuum table procedure which is coming up next and once I've got those main sections down flat I'll just go around and tack the edges of the painting down as well so it's nice and secure on that loom before I remove it right guys I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave that there for this week we've made quite a bit of progress there for all the structural work getting it off the stretcher getting it on the loom getting it ready to go then marrying all those parts up next week we will be going on the vacuum table and we will be heating that up to flatten that out completely and then we will begin the cleaning process so I hope you enjoyed that thank you to all my new subscribers welcome thanks to my patrons for supporting the channel without you this wouldn't be happening so thank you very much for that and yeah I hope you enjoyed it and come back next week I will try to get this for you next week another video and we will start cleaning the painting quick weather report Manchester is cold today don't know if you can see that icy cold minus two hope you all have a nice weekend and I will catch up with you all soon thanks for watching guys see you later