The Restoration of St. Francis

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. So the title of this video is Big Isn't Better, It's Just Better, and that's a reference to a professor I had in college who talked about the scale of any piece of artwork having an impact on how we view it, and not just literally how we look at it, but how we understand the piece. And so as you can see, this is a fairly large painting. Now, it's certainly not the largest painting I've ever worked on, but it's the largest one I've ever made a video on. And so I wanted to take this opportunity to show you guys how I handle a really large painting. Now, just like any other painting, this has its fair share of damage. It's quite dirty. There's a lot of old candle soot and smoke and old varnish on it. There's some splatter from painting, like house painting, on it. There are a couple of areas of damage, some punctures, a couple of tears, lots of indentations. There's some flaking along the edges and in isolated spots throughout the painting. And the paint layer itself is very heavily cracked. There are a lot of planar distortions. And so when you look at the painting, generally you're seeing the surface a The light catches all those cracks and it flattens the painting's depth. And so all of that is going to need to be addressed. And many of the techniques and approaches that I'm going to use in this video are some that many of you will be very familiar with if you've seen some of my other videos. There's not much different to what I'm going to be doing on this painting, but it's a really big painting. So it really is kind of different. And I wanted to take this opportunity to show you how I work on a painting that's, well, bigger than me. So obviously the first thing I need to do is take some time with this painting to understand the problems, the issues, and just kind of let myself absorb the image, the construction, and think about what I'm going to do to it. And that's just simply looking. Now the first step in the conservation of this painting is to clean it. And there are two stages in the cleaning process for this particular painting. The first is to remove the accumulated surface grime that is resting atop that old varnish layer. And the accumulated surface grime is just that. It's grime that is stuck to the surface of the painting. And that grime consists of dust, dirt, oils, smoke, candle smoke, fire smoke, soot smoke, and just other stuff that has stuck to the surface of the painting. And I need to remove this stuff before I can get access to the old varnish layer. Because if I try to use the solvent mixture that I normally use to remove the varnish without removing all this surface grime, that solvent mixture isn't going to cut through this surface grime. And it's never really going to reach the varnish. And so I might find myself using a more aggressive solvent mixture than is actually necessary, because I didn't remove the surface grime first. So by removing the surface grime, I can get access to that old varnish layer. And then we can start to see what the painting really should look like. Now this painting is owned by a seminary in northern Wisconsin, and they've had it for 100 years or so. And this painting is from 1873, so it's a pretty old painting. And during the course of its life, it was in the building when there was a fire. And luckily the painting wasn't damaged, but the smoke is all over the surface. In addition, it has been on display with candles lit in front of it for many years, and in an open alcove area where the environment hasn't been very favorable to it. So there is a lot of surface grime and a lot of dirt and just gunk on the surface. And of course the old natural resin varnish layer has deteriorated over time and really yellowed quite a bit. So as you can see, it's going to be a really different painting when I'm done with it. Now if you notice in the right-hand corner of the screen, I put a little timer. And it's at zero right now because I just started cleaning the painting. But I wanted to give you guys an idea of just how long it takes to work on a painting of this scale. Now I'm working extremely fast because I sped up the camera, but we're going to be coming upon an hour already. Now I wish I could work this fast in real life, but unfortunately there's no way to speed up the process of cleaning. This is one of the most delicate parts of working on any painting, because it's a reductive process. And by that I mean if you mess up when you're retouching, you can always wipe the retouching off. But if you mess up while cleaning, well you can't put that original paint back on. So it's really important to make sure that you are working in a controlled manner. And I like to work on various colors at one time. So I will work on the green of the fabric. And the reason that I work in controlled colors is because not all colors are as stable as others. And this has to do with the materials that the paint was made of, and how the artist mixed it, and how they applied it. And so while I'm cleaning the background here, where there's a lot of white, and it may be more stable, when I clean the face I may have to use a different concentration of solvent or paste to remove the surface grime. And so it's not as simple as making a big batch of cleaning solution and scrubbing the whole painting down. I wish it was. It would make my life a lot easier. Perhaps if somebody invented the Painting Cleaner 1000, and you could just stick a painting in a big machine and press a button, and it would come out looking sparkly brand new, that would be fantastic. But unfortunately that's just not the case. And so as you can see I'm working slowly, working around different shapes, but there's still a lot of grime left over. I mean that background isn't fully cleaned yet. And I'm always going to take a more conservative approach, and cautious approach. And if I have to go back into the painting and work on it again, I can always do that. And so it's always better to under clean on your first shot, and then go back and clean again, rather than try to scrub and scrub and scrub and get everything off in the first shot. Because like I said, if you go too far, you can't put that back. And that's a really big problem. And so I mentioned different strength solvents and different strength cleaners. And this is a really good case in point. I'm using the same paste to remove the surface grime, but I'm using a very mild solvent. Because this area of Jesus's face and his hair is much more glazy. And by that I mean that the artists thinned out the paint and put it on with less binders in it. And when they thinned out the paint they use probably a little oil, probably a little solvent, and they change the ratio of binders to pigment in the paint. And whenever you reduce the concentration of binders, the paint just becomes a little bit more fugitive. And that's just a term for vulnerable or susceptible to other solvents. It's like if you take some Elmer's glue and you thin it out quite a bit. It's just not going to be as strong as if it was 100% concentrated. And so because of that, I'm using a much more mild approach here, because I don't want to do any damage to the painting. And I always like to leave the eyes last, partially for dramatic effect, but also because this is the thing that everybody's going to look at. And the eyes are always a really important part of any painting. The artist takes a lot of care to paint them a certain way and to create an atmosphere and a feeling around the eyes. And for me as a conservator, it's kind of a special moment to work on the eyes. You know, they say that the eyes are the window to the soul, etc, right? Whatever. But it's still always a special experience cleaning the eyes, because it's a really intimate experience. And you get this feeling that you're kind of knowing the painting a little bit more. You're seeing into the painting maybe the first time since it was painted. And so it's kind of special. And that's why I like to reserve it for the end. Now, you can see all those little black and brown dots. I'm going to have to deal with all of those later, because apparently that's not just surface grime, and it doesn't come off very easily with the solvent or the paste. And that is a bummer. But I'll deal with that in a little bit. So now we are at 22 hours of cleaning, which sounds crazy. And I mean, it kind of is. But I'm not even done cleaning the yet. And you can see just how many swabs I've gone through. I mentioned all those little black and brown dots. Well, that's paint, house paint, or something like it that perhaps splattered on the painting when a room was painted or something like that. And so I have to go with my scalpel and scrape each and every one of them off. Yeah, each and every little dot of paint has got to be manually scraped off. Not something that I'm excited about, but it is what it is. And this really is the most tedious part of the cleaning of this painting. But there's no easy way to do it. So I just have to be patient and work my way through it. Man, this is taking forever. I mean, it is. I've been at this for what? Stop. 20 some odd hours? Thank you. And you know what? For a painting of this scale and a conservation of this scope, it's going to take however long it's going to take. My clients aren't in a hurry, and there's really no way to rush it. But that doesn't mean that everything should take a long time. Like that website you've been procrastinating about. But unless you're a professional website builder, you probably don't want to spend a lot of time building a website. And if you're an artist, your time is even more valuable and better spent in your studio creating your artwork. And so in the amount of time it's going to take to watch this entire video, you could head over to Squarespace and get a beautiful, modern, mobile, friendly website up and running and get your artwork out in front of the world's eyes. And then you can get back to your studio where, if I'm right, you probably spend enough time procrastinating as is. So next time you're having a creativity block, go over to Squarespace.com for your free trial. And when you're ready to get that website launched, go to Squarespace.com slash Baumgartner for 10% off your first domain or website. Okay, it's settled then. You go start making that website, and I'll get back to this. You can start. Okay, back to the video. Now, it's taken about 30 or so hours to get to this point where all the surface grime and varnish are removed, but there's still old retouching, or I don't even know if you can call this retouching. It's more like brown-green blobby overpainting. And this is done in oil, and there's no isolation or barrier layer, so it's directly on the painting. And over time, as this oil cross-links and oxidizes, it gets harder and harder to remove. So I have to use some pretty aggressive chemicals, and I'll apply them, remove them, apply them, remove them, until I've gotten as much as I safely can get off. And you can see that the damage is really minimal. Didn't need all that overpainting. And now we've come to a point where I can start to address some of the structural issues this painting has. And what I need to do is gain access to the back of the painting. So I've pushed two of my tables together to give me an eight foot by eight foot platform onto which I can place the painting face down. And this now gives me access to the canvas and all of these patches that were used to address the holes and punctures. And of course, I'm going to be removing these patches and all of the adhesives that were used to adhere them to the canvas. And there are three or four patches, and each one uses a different set of materials. This one uses a frayed canvas patch that's adhered with what I think is an Elmer's or PVA white glue. And using a solvent, I can soften up that glue. And using scalpel, I can start to remove it from the back of the canvas. And I may have to repeat this procedure several times to soften up all of the adhesive and remove it from the canvas. But once I get all of that off, we'll have the raw canvas, and we can get a better idea of just how bad the damage to the original canvas is. I mean, that is, we can see just how bad that tear was. And really, not that bad at all. Now, this is my favorite type of patch because I can remove it with a stern look. And you can see that this canvas is totally deteriorated. It's barely even glued down to the original canvas, and the adhesive that was used, I mean, it's not really doing anything. Now, instead of softening up this adhesive or reactivating it with moisture or solvent, I'm just going to scrape it off the surface. Because if I reactivate it, there's a pretty good chance that the canvas is going to absorb all of that adhesive, and then I'm going to have to extract it. So just scraping it off the surface does all that I need. And again, really a small tear that didn't need a big patch. And now, if the last patch was my favorite type, this is easily my least favorite. And this patch consists of a thin piece of fabric sandwiched in between two pretty thick layers of white lead paint. And I don't like dealing with white lead paint because the dust is toxic, so I can't remove it dry. And there isn't any one solvent or chemical mixture that can quickly, safely soften it up to be removed. So I'll have to use a pretty aggressive chemical in multiple applications to soften up this lead. And so I'll scrape off this canvas, I'll apply another layer of the chemical, I'll let it sit, I'll scrape again. Lather, rinse, repeat. But because this white lead was applied directly to the canvas and really embedded into that canvas texture, it may be impossible for me to remove all of it. And that's unfortunate, but that's kind of a reality of dealing with this type of patch. So at a certain point, I'll have to call it quits because I don't want to damage the canvas anymore. But ultimately, I need to bring down as much of this white lead as possible. I need a smooth, even texture, and I want to reveal as much of the original canvas as I can so that I can repair it later on in a more effective, more delicate manner. And so you can see I've gotten almost all of it off, but that's about as much as I can do. So with all the patches removed, I can start to take the stretcher off of the canvas. And there are a gajillion little tacks, many of them rusted into place. But using a specialized tool, I can pull all of them out and start to separate the two. I want to take great care when I remove these tacks because I don't want to do any more damage to the tacking edge. As you can see, there is a lot of damage already to it. And this lets me know that I'm going to have to reinforce this tacking edge because I just don't trust that it's going to be able to carry the weight of this painting without failing. And that'd be the last thing that I want. Spend all this time working on the painting, put it back on the stretcher, and then have a tacking edge fail. So I'm going to remove the stretcher. I'm going to do so very slowly because there are always a few tacks that are hidden, that you don't catch, or even just the canvas is stuck to the stretcher. And I want to make sure that when I remove the stretcher, I'm not pulling the canvas with it, and that the canvas doesn't end up on the floor. Because that would be very bad. Now this stretcher is fine. It is in good condition, and it just needs to be cleaned. Now behind the stretcher is a ton of debris. Dust, dirt, all sorts of gunk. And I'm using a vacuum and a bristle brush to remove it. I'm not going to vacuum the canvas directly because I don't want to take the chance that the pressure is too strong, and then it pinches or pulls that canvas. Now because this painting was removed from the stretcher, transporting it is going to be a little difficult. So I'm going to roll it onto a large diameter concrete forming tube. And pay attention everybody, really close here, because this is the only time you will ever see me on camera using staples. But look, they go in easily. I'm going to pull them out in a matter of minutes, and they get the job done. Now I'm going to roll the painting paint layer out, because I don't want to take the chance that I compress any of that paint and cause flaking. That is, if I rolled it with the paint in, as it conformed around the shape of the tube, I would be compressing that paint. And wherever it's cracked, I could potentially cause flaking. So take note if you ever have to transport a painting. Always roll it paint layer out. Now with the painting on the tube, I can take it to the back room, to the hot table, where I'm going to perform a vapor treatment. Before I can do the next treatment, I need to prep the hot table. And I'm doing that by laying down several sheets of cotton blotter paper. And cotton blotter paper is composed of 100% cotton rag fibers that have been compressed. And this paper absorbs and holds onto moisture really well. And that's necessary because sometimes the canvas will be exposed to moisture before this treatment. But with this painting, I don't actually need to add any moisture. This canvas is so large that it's holding on to enough ambient humidity for my purposes. And now what I'm doing here is something called a vapor treatment. And I'm using moisture, heat, and pressure to relax and flatten the canvas and get rid of any planar distortions, much like you would when you iron a shirt. But I'm doing so on a much larger controlled level. And here you can see why I used staples. They went in really easy and they come out really easy. They do make two tiny punctures in the canvas, but I'm going to reinforce this tacking edge anyways. And you can see that I used a piece of cotton canvas atop the original just to make sure that the crossbar of the staple doesn't cut the canvas. Once the canvas is positioned how I want on the blotter paper, I'll take some cotton webbing and run it around the perimeter of the canvas and then in a matrix across the surface of the canvas. And this is just going to facilitate the extraction of the air once I create the envelope using the mylar film. And so I'll lay the mylar film atop the painting, I'll tape it down, and then I'll add my air extraction ports. And these are through bag connectors. So this disc goes down, it gets punctured, and then this other part gets placed on and tightened. The hose gets attached to the vacuum pump, the vacuum pressure is turned on, the hot table is turned on, and I can start to extract the air and bring the table to the correct temperature. Now I'm only bringing this painting up to about 100 degrees because I don't need much heat. I also don't need much pressure, but as you can see when the vacuum pump is on I can extract all of that air and create a nice even downward pressure. I'm only using about five mercury inches because I don't want to compress this painting too much. I'll use a piece of balsa wood to smooth out any of the ripples that are in the mylar film and then I'll monitor the painting as it comes up to temperature. I wasn't kidding about not needing to apply any moisture to this painting because as the table heats up you can see just how much water is extracted by the vacuum pump. Now once that treatment was completed I can start with the adhesive impregnation. Now because this painting had a lot of cracks and because it's going back into an open air atrium, I need to do something to help stabilize the canvas. And so I'm rolling on a heat and solvent activated conservation adhesive and once this penetrates into the canvas I'll flip the painting over, turn the heat back on, create another envelope with the mylar, extract the air, and allow this adhesive to penetrate through all of the nooks and crannies into and around all of the paint layer. And this is going to help make it a little bit more resistant to humidity changes because in the environment that it's going to be displayed in it's going to be subject to open air without an HVAC system. So I need to make sure that this painting resists as much as possible. Once that treatment is complete I can start reinforcing the tacking edges. Now as you remember these tacking edges were pretty worn, the canvas was torn up a bit, there were lots of holes, and ultimately this is a pretty large and heavy painting and I just didn't trust them to provide adequate support. So I'm doing what's known as an edge lining or a strip lining. Using the same adhesive but in a film form I'm bonding this new piece of Belgian linen canvas to the original. And that bond is incredibly strong and it not only provides more meat for me to work with when I have to stretch the painting but it ensures that once the painting is stretched onto the stretcher it's not going to tear or fall off and that's of paramount importance. Now while the painting is still flat on the hot table I'm going to take advantage of its position to do an inlay where there was a hole. Now I've gathered several scraps of canvas from my collection and I'm checking to see which one has a similar weave and weight so that I can lay it underneath the canvas and use it as the fill in. Whenever there's a missing piece of canvas you have to put something there and another piece of canvas is the best thing. So once I have settled on the canvas that I want to use I can trace it and I'm going to just use a pencil and I'm going to follow the contour of the hole and then once that's done I will cut this piece out. Unfortunately there weren't any regular canvas fibers remaining from this hole that I could use to reweave or integrate into this inlay so I'm going to have to bridge this repair. So once the inlay is all cut out I'll set it into the void and then I'll start the bridging process. And those of you who have seen my earlier videos are familiar with the bridging process. It's a method whereby I can use strips of Belgian linen laid perpendicularly across the tear, the hole, or the inlay to secure and hold it in place. This is a much lighter weight method of addressing a tear or a puncture than a large patch. It still allows the canvas to move and breathe. It doesn't impart a ghost on the face of canvas over time as do patches and it's much much more easily removed than a massive patch. Now the adhesive I'm using is a conservation grade adhesive so it's stable, it's flexible, and it's archival and if ever it does need to be removed it can be done so using water or a little bit of alcohol. So just taking my time using tweezers and some dental tools I'm going to lay these fibers, these little strands of Belgian linen, across this inlay and secure them in place into the adhesive bed that I've laid down. There's no easy way to do this, there's no fast way to do it. It's kind of tedious but it provides a really strong repair with a really lightweight footprint and makes sure that if indeed it does need to be removed in the future it's much much easier than having to scrape off a white lead patch. Once I'm done I'll press it with a piece of felt and let that sit for several days and that ensures that as the adhesive dries the canvas is as flat as possible. And so with all of the structural work complete on the canvas it's now time to return it to the stretcher. And this stretcher is fine, there's no damage to it, it's not cracked, there's no insect infestation, it hasn't warped, it's providing adequate support for the painting so there's no reason not to use it. But before I can reuse it I have to secure the corners. So I'm going to square the stretcher up and I'm going to use some nails to hold it in place. And because this is a stretcher not a strainer those joints are free floating and that is it. They're not glued in place, there's no mechanical fastener holding this together. So if I don't secure it with those nails when I handle this stretcher or when I'm tacking the painting to it it could fall apart or distort and that would be a minor disaster. So I've transferred the painting back to the roll and I'm going to clamp it onto the stretcher temporarily and unroll it. And this is the point at which having an extra set of hands would be really helpful but rather than tricking my brother into coming in and working for free again I've developed an approach that allows me to transfer the painting successfully without cashing in on my brotherly relationship. And as you can see it was pretty quick, it was easy, and the painting has been successfully transferred without any undue trauma. Now I'm going to clamp the corners in place because this is a large painting and as I handle it and stretch it it has a tendency to migrate and I don't want it to be stretched out of square. Now to stretch this painting I'm going to be using steel upholstery tacks and I'm going to be using a technique called spitting tacks. This is an old upholsterer's trick whereby the tacks are held in your cheek and you use your tongue and your lips to bring one to the front of your mouth and you use your magnetic hammer to pull them out and then tack them in place. And you may be thinking well a that's disgusting and b what about all the saliva that's on them. Well for the most part they're they're fairly dry I'm not drooling all over these tacks but this extra saliva the extra moisture that's on them is actually of great benefit because this is a really old really dry piece of wood. When I put these tacks in if I didn't have any moisture on them they kind of pop right out they slide right out. I know this from experience but the extra moisture that's on the tacks when the tacks get driven into the wood the wood around the tack absorbs that moisture and swells and tightens around the tack and holds it into place and so a little bit of saliva is of great benefit. Now because this is a really large painting I'm using my upholstery pliers to put some tension on the canvas. Normally I can do this with my hands but this is a big painting and I don't want my hands raw by the end of the day and the plier just gives me a little bit of extra strength when I'm pulling this canvas and you can see how effective it is at pulling out that slack and so I'll move slowly from the center out until I've completely attached the canvas to the stretcher and then I can go about attaching that tacking edge to the verso or back of the stretcher. I'm using smaller nails and I'm folding the canvas over just so that it's tidy. Now these small nails aren't necessarily providing a ton of extra support but they are certainly better than no nails and it makes it look nice and clean and I like the back of my paintings to look as good as the front and once I've completed that I can go ahead and key this painting out. Now these wooden wedges are inserted into mortises in the and then with a hammer I can expand these joints and add tension to the painting and this is especially necessary for a painting that's this large whereby even if I pulled those pliers during the stretching process really really tight I still wouldn't be able to get even and consistent pressure across the entire painting and so using those wedges, using those keys, I can make sure that the painting has a nice even tension across the entirety of it. And before I can do any retouching I have to do some fill-in on the areas where the paint was lost and I'm using a flexible reversible putty and I'm just putting it into the area where the paint is missing. I'll overfill it and then I'll come back and I'll start to remove the excess and what I'm looking to do is to bring the void up to the same surface level as the original paint so that when I apply the retouching paints we don't have a textural difference because even if the color matches perfect if you have a textural difference you can see the work that's been done. Now my palette may look like a hot mess and everybody always comments that I need a new palette but the reality is that these are fully reversible archival conservation paints and what that means is that they can be reactivated with a solvent. So unlike oil paint which uses an oil as a binder, this uses a resin and that resin no matter how old it is can be reactivated with solvent. So in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, if somebody comes back and wants to undo the retouching that I've done they can do so very easily. If you remember the retouching that I had to remove from this painting, how difficult it was? It is the polar opposite using these paints and that's why I use them. Now one of the difficulties in using these paints is that they dry really quickly so unlike oil paint which has a long open time and that is it just dries really slowly, I can't really paint with these paints and by that I mean I'm not really painting. I'm dabbing little dots of color onto the painting surface so it's more like I'm stippling than I am fluidly painting and this has its benefits in that it prevents the conservator from overpainting or getting too liberal with their brush but it's also really sometimes kind of frustrating because as you're applying the paint it's pretty much drying on your brush so you have to constantly revisit your palette, re-wet the paint, and then go back so it slows the process down. Ultimately though nobody's paying me for speed they're paying me for quality work and so if it takes a little bit more time so be it. I'm retouching an area of staining or damage that I wasn't able to remove with either the paste or solvents. I don't know what this material is and I don't have anything that will adequately remove it so I have to Now there was a lot of fine crack allure on this painting and no matter how much I cleaned it it wouldn't go away and so rather than leave an area where there's a now uniform color of retouching I'm going to disguise that retouching using some cracks. I'm going to paint these in so that when your eye glances across this area you don't see that gap where I've applied the retouching paint. You see what appears to be a normal part of the painting and keep in mind this is a really big painting and there is a lot going on and these are very fine cracks and so at any distance that you would normally view this painting this area of retouching is going to disappear and lest you are told where to look and instructed to use a black light you won't see this. This is often one of the fun parts adding cracks because it is an almost instant way that you can see the retouching disappear and it's always kind of fun because you think well I worked so hard to remove the cracks why am I painting them back in but ultimately we are in service of the image and if the painting has cracks then the retouching should have cracks. So I'm just searching for areas of like color that I can retouch. When I'm working in the yellows I'm going to stay working in the yellows I'm not going to move on to a different color because a I have the color mixed on my palette and because my eyes are trained to that color right now and that is the more time I spend with one color the more I learn how to more effectively mix it and how I need to apply it to the painting to make sure that the retouching is accurate. So by bouncing between colors it kind of gets a little confusing whereas if I can stay within one color I can get much more efficient at it and not only does the retouching get better but I'm also much faster so it's better for me. So I'll work through this background bouncing around with the different yellows until I've achieved a level that I'm happy with and ultimately I'm not going to be viewing this painting this close. Number one the painting is going to be displayed whereby the closest a viewer would ever be able to get to it is about 10 feet so that's probably the metric by which I will use to determine how much to retouch because if I tried to retouch all of these cracks or every single little imperfection I'd be doing this for the rest of the year and it would cost a fortune for my clients. So at about 10 feet anything that I see that is problematic or invasive is a candidate for retouching and all of these little dark black dots these splatters or whatever they are these are problematic for me at the distance and so I'm going to retouch them away. Some of the really really tiny ones I probably won't but as I back up and move away from the painting if I can see them I'm going to retouch them and ultimately if my client comes back and says well you know all of these little dots that you didn't retouch are really problematic can you go back in and and do it again I can certainly do that and I'm not opposed to doing it and sometimes that's what's required. Now faces on the other hand are much more important to get right. These are the areas that people are going to focus on and so I want to make sure that I can get as many of the small little imperfections as I can out of the way but one thing I'm not trying to do is remove all of the cracks. You'll notice that I haven't retouched any of them on this face because if I retouch them too much the face is going to look different than the surrounding paint layer and that is I want this painting to unify. I don't want the faces to be super polished and free of any signs of age like cracking and then the rest of the painting to be covered with cracks or signs of age. So it's a delicate balance and there's no right or wrong answer it's just a matter of feeling your way through it and feeling your way through it comes after hundreds of hours of retouching. And now this is an area where there was old overpaint that I wasn't able to remove. I didn't feel like using a really aggressive solvent right here was going to be a wise choice and so rather than try to remove it and run risk of taking any of the original paint off I'm just going to retouch over it and it may seem crazy but what it allowed me to do is to disguise the damage to make it go away visually but to do no harm and that is let's say in 100 years we're using lasers or carbon nanotubes to remove retouching and to conserve paintings. Well this retouching can be removed and that method can be executed if successful but what I don't want to do is strip off any of the original paint while I'm getting this retouching off because as I mentioned before you can't put that paint back and that's the paint that the artist applied that's the artist's original hand and it's my job to respect and preserve that. So again I'm just working in hyper time to reintegrate this area and make sure that it looks good and that you don't see the damage and I may have to come back a couple times and revisit some of these areas as the paint dries or in different light because sometimes the colors shift over time or on a different day you notice something that you didn't notice upon first glance and so it's always a good idea to make multiple passes on a painting when you're retouching it sometimes even leaving it for a couple of days before you revisit it. And now for this face I am going to be retouching a lot of these cracks and I know it flies in the face of what I just said a minute ago but these cracks are problematic for me they break up the sensitivity that the artist used to paint this face and I want them to go away so I'm going to work to slowly break them up and just kind of disguise them make them go away so that we can start to see the face and the expression and not the cracks and again there's no hard and fast rule about what does and doesn't get retouched you kind of have to feel your way through it as you're working on the painting and some areas like the yellow background to the left of the face I'm not going to spend a lot of time retouching because it's not really a focal point and the time and money spent there could be better used elsewhere and also it's just not that important I know it sounds crazy to say that because yes everything is important on a painting but the background I feel like there's a little bit more tolerance for letting some of the age and the wear exist now if it's terribly problematic then yes I'll retouch it but in this case where it's just cracks I can live with it and I talk to my clients about it and they can too and now after all of that tedious retouching is done I can move on to varnishing and that retouching took forever I mean I did not have a beard when we started this project so I'll move the painting to the back half of the studio where I do my varnishing and I'll set it up and even though my preferred method of varnishing is with a brush for this painting I'm going to be using an HVLP spray system an HVLP system uses a high volume of air at a very low pressure to atomize whatever it is you're spraying and this gives you a very very fine very even coating on the surface and this is necessary because I want to build up several layers of varnish and that's just not possible with a brush because if you were to reapply varnish with a brush it would disturb the previous layer and make a mess but with the spray system I can apply multiple coats and the reason that I want to build up this varnish is because this painting is going to be going back into that open air atrium area that I previously spoke about and it's going to be subject to potentially humidity changes and also high traffic a large volume of people passing it and I want to make sure that if anything happens to this painting if anything comes in contact with the surface that the varnish takes the beating that is if somebody bumps into it or somebody spills something on it or a bird poops on it that the varnish is what fails not the painting so the next thing that I'm going to be doing after the varnish is completely dried is hand buffing now I've applied varnish to literally thousands upon thousands of paintings and I like to think that I'm pretty good at deciding upon the sheen for any given painting but every once in a while you miss the mark by a little bit and generally I would just remove the varnish and start over again but because I want to bring the sheen down and because I've spent a lot of time building up that varnish I'm going to be buffing it out and I'm using a piece of felt because it's fairly soft yet it's abrasive enough that it will create micro texture scratches in the surface of that varnish and those micro texture scratches are going to help diffuse the light that hits the surface so I can take an otherwise a little bit too shiny varnish and I can bring that sheen down by hand buffing it and this is something that nobody ever taught me in any school this is just something that I learned along the way and picked up from watching other master conservators work and it's a pretty useful trick and so now all of the work I've done is complete the painting is fully cleaned the paint layer has been stabilized and much of the damage has been retouched now you'll notice that there's still a lot of cracking there and there is still the evidence of wear and age and that's because my clients were worried that the painting was going to look too new that is they didn't mind that the painting had age and wear they just wanted it to look better and so we talked a lot about what approach was going to be best for this painting and we settled on doing some retouching but leaving some areas not fully retouched and you can see here that the cracks have really been brought down and that's important because I want to make sure that you can see the painting and not the cracks and ultimately I think this was a really great project I know that my clients are going to be very very happy and when they get the painting back up they're going to be delighted to show it off to the entire seminary to their congregation and to all of their visitors this is the largest painting they have and it really is the centerpiece of their collection so to be without it for so long was really tough for them but I think that once they get it back they'll realize just how well worth it it was and so here we have the painting as it came into the studio and then we have the painting after conservation a little bit of a difference huh thanks for watching and take care and look at how much care he's taking turning this canvas around paying very close attention to get it on the pad and handling the painting very carefully because of course he's on camera little as you know it's upside down chokes on him you knucklehead