Oh, Brother Part 2

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. From websites and online stores, to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. If the first episode of Oh Brother was about undoing things, the old lining, the surface grime, the varnish, the overpainting, and all of the previous repairs, well, this episode is focused on redoing things. If we took it apart, now we have to put it back together. I had hoped that the lining would have proven to be superfluous and totally unnecessary, but of course, seeing the extent of the damage to the canvas, lots and lots of tears, lots of holes, and otherwise just a very weak and deteriorated canvas, it does need ancillary support. If we can avoid doing a lining or an interleaved lining, then of course we do that, but sometimes it is just necessary. If we were to try to put this painting back onto a stretcher without a lining, it would inevitably tear and that would be malpractice. So we coat the back of the painting and the interleaved material with a heat-activated adhesive. This can be mixed to different viscosities depending on its application and what we want out of it, and in this case, it's fairly thick, so to sit on the surface. Once the adhesive has dried, the solvent has evaporated from the adhesive and left just the adhesive, I can take it over to the painting and I can start tracing around the painting. I need this interleaf to be the exact same size as the image of the painting. I also need it to fit on the stretcher, so I will put the stretcher on top and trace around that, and then I will have two measurements. One, the size of the stretcher, and two, the size of the canvas. And I will split the baby in half, and I'll cut in between both of those to have a good, happy medium. I want it to be as big as possible without being too big, because if it's too big, then I can't fold it around the stretcher. If it's too small, you'll see a crease or a ridge where it ends, but if it's just right, well, it'll be just right. The next thing I need to do is prepare the adhesive film, which is just a film version of the same adhesive that I use, also heat activated, and this will get adhered to the new canvas, a piece of Belgian linen. Because this is heat activated, I can use a standard iron to tack it down in place. This isn't the part that is going to permanently bond it to the canvas. This is mostly just to get it tacked to the canvas and held in place. The hot table will do the permanent bonding. But whenever we introduce heat to things, we get distortions, and so I am tracing my root with a cold weight, and it is going to help minimize the amount of distortions in the canvas, and also iron out some of those wrinkles that may have been embedded in the canvas from being rolled up. Even though the hot table can get rid of them, I don't want to run the risk that they transfer to the painting, because that can happen, and then you have to take it all apart and start all over again. Not the end of the world, but certainly nothing that, if you can avoid, why wouldn't you avoid it? The release film is removed, and now I can place the canvas with the interleaf attached to the back onto the canvas. Now we have this sandwich, and as I align it, I am preparing to transfer it over to the hot table. Once it's aligned, over to the hot table, a couple of sheets of release film on top of the painting so that it doesn't stick to anything, because there are some areas where the adhesive film is exposed, or where the adhesive that I rolled onto the back of the canvas has bled through. Then I'll take some mylar film and create an envelope, tape it down to the hot table, put in my extraction webbing, which allows me to pull the air out, put in my vacuum through, which allow me to put vacuum pump attachments through the mylar, then I'll turn on the heat, turn on the pressure, and extract all of the air from this envelope. I now have the painting being brought up to temperature, the temperature that will activate the adhesive, and I have downward pressure on the painting, forcing it into that layer of adhesive that's not only on the interleaf material, but on the piece of canvas. Now I'm gonna go across, and in areas where I did the inlays, I'm gonna use a piece of balsa wood, a very soft pliable wood, to go across and just kind of force everything down. The whole lining process takes a few hours to come up to temperature, soak in the heat, and then be brought down to temperature and cool. But once it's all done, I can remove the envelope, remove the webbing, remove the release film, remove the painting from the hot table, and transfer it over to the front half of the studio. This painting is now stable and secure. Before the painting can go back on the stretcher, we have to take a look at the support itself and make sure it's up to the task. And though the stretcher is hidden, it is a quintessential part of the success of what we see, not unlike all of the complex code and technical innovations behind a Squarespace website. Last time I talked about how easy it was to launch a Squarespace website, and it is. 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This support needs a little bit of work before I can use it. It's not original. This is a replacement support, and because of that, kind of all bets are off. I can do a lot to it. Now, we discussed replacing it with a newer custom-built one, but oval supports are very, very expensive, particularly of this size and scale, and the client did not feel that it was necessary or appropriate. I tried to convince them otherwise, but ultimately it is their decision. And owing to that, I have to work within those parameters and confines. That doesn't mean that I'm just going to leave well enough alone or accept what is, if I can make it better. And in this case, I can. And it all begins with disassembling the support and then heading over to my router table. This is almost purely cosmetic. There is literally no functional reason that I'm doing this, but I have to do some repairs and I have to work on this support. And so I figured, why not make it a little bit more attractive? Make it look a little bit more designed and crafted, as opposed to kind of just thrown together as it does now. So I'm putting a little decorative edge. I think it's called an OG edge on the inter edge of the stretcher. I think it's just gonna make it look a little bit nicer for a painting that's pretty grand as is. I'm then gonna remove some of the oxidation and some of this paint that was applied over some of these cracks and checks. Again, this has nothing to do with any fidelity or structural support. It's mostly just to clean up the stretcher and make it look worthy of a painting that I'm going to be investing a lot of time and energy into. This does take time, but I think it's gonna be worth it because when the client sees the back, they're gonna be happy with the result. This, however, is a structural repair. Because it is split here, I need to glue it back together, and I'm just using standard wood glue. This is not reversible in any way. I don't need it to be or want it to be. Then I'm gonna add a little block of wood onto the edge of the support, screw it into place so that I can vector clamp this closed while the glue dries. This enables me to put a clamp across and squeeze this glue joint shut. Once that glue joint is dry, I can remove the clamp, I can remove that little block, and we can see that the stretcher is now stable. It's exactly what we wanted. But there is more work to be done. This stretcher doesn't have a lip or a bevel, meaning that it just rests directly against the canvas. That's not the end of the world because we did an interleaf, but it's still not ideal. We do want some airflow, and we don't want that canvas resting directly against the wood. So I'm gonna create a lip. And I have a whole bunch of little half-circle trim pieces from some other side project lying around the studio, and I'm gonna use them. I'm gonna cut them in half to make a quarter round. And these are oak. I'm using oak for a very specific reason, even though the stretcher support is pine. And I'll explain that reason in just a second. Trust me. With these strips all cut, I can go ahead and start steam bending them. And that's the reason I chose oak, because it responds to steam bending incredibly well without breaking, splintering, or losing its fidelity. If I tried pine, it probably wouldn't be as good, and other woods like poplar do present some problems. Oak is fantastic. So oak it is. Into a piece of PVC, I have created a steam chamber. I have my little steam generator, and then I will just close this up and let it sit. At the back, there is an escape hole for the steam so the pressure doesn't build up, and in the front there's a drainage hole for all of the condensation to drain out. Once it's been allowed to steam long enough, I can apply glue to the stretcher, and then I can remove the piece of wood from this little steam chamber box. I'm wearing gloves just because I don't want to get burned. It's not terribly hot, but it's always a good precaution. I need my hands, and so, you know, this makes sense. You can see that the wood is very flexible. This is a thin piece of wood, and it's been steaming for about 15 minutes. And so on to the stretcher it goes, and Kit and I have a lot of different clamps. We have little C-clamps, we have bar clamps, and we have spring clamps. We don't have a ton of time to work. It's not like a mad dash race, but we do want to be efficient and speedy, because once it starts to dry out and cool, it gets much, much harder to bend this wood. So as I go along and bend the wood to the contour of the stretcher, trying to match it as closely as possible, Kit will hand me little clamps, and I will just clamp the piece into place. And this is going to provide plenty of support. These little spring clamps are very strong, and when you use enough of them, they'll hold their shape. Also, this wood isn't very thick, so it doesn't need a lot of clamping force to hold it into place. If it were much thicker, if I were building a chair or something, I would need much stronger clamps and maybe even a form to clamp against. But you can see, this wood bends really, really easily. It's almost like it's just a piece of PVC. And that's great, because imagine having to create this curve and shape out of a solid piece of wood. Not only would it be incredibly wasteful, but it wouldn't be all that strong. Because this is bent, the grain runs continuously, so it's really, really strong. Again, not a big issue here, because I'm not creating anything structural. Again, like a chair that's going to carry weight, this is kind of just passive. But if we can have it strong and we can not waste material, it's kind of just a no-brainer in my book. So we do have to do four pieces, and occasionally we'll have to come back and undo some clamping and redo some clamping, as the wood bends a little bit. But we have plenty of time, and we've done this a couple times, so we're not in a mad dash. And there it is, all clamped up with a bajillion little clamps. You can never have too many. And we have all four pieces complete. Now, the wood does extend beyond the stretcher sections, and I'll trim that once it's dry. Of course, to get access to the wood, I need to take off all of these clamps. But that's the easy part, let's be honest. And then I can go ahead and finish up these pieces. And it's really just as simple as taking a saw and trimming off the excess. And here I'm using a flush-cut Japanese-style saw. This is a pull saw, and I know I'm using it the wrong way, but it is efficient and it got the job done. So, you know, I don't need the right act. I'm going to go ahead and sand this down just a little bit to make sure it's not sharp or it doesn't have any splinters, and then I can go ahead and start reassembling this support. Now, some of the work I have done has been necessary. The repair and the lip that I steam bent, and some of it was cosmetic. The decorative edge and the sanding. But, you know, if I'm going to spend all this time repairing it, I may as well make it look good, too. I mean, at least I think. And now we can finally put the painting back onto the stretcher. Which is actually interesting because we don't need a stretcher. Because this painting had an interleaved lining, it is immobilized. It's not going to expand or contract with humidity changes. And when we key this stretcher out, this painting isn't going to get more taut. So we could have used a strainer, which is a version of the stretcher just without flexible joints and the ability to key it out. It's just a rigid support nailed and glued into one piece. But we have a stretcher, and we did that extra work, and so we're going to use it. And even though it's not going to add tension to the painting, it will be a fine support. And if ever this painting needs to come off of this lining for whatever reason, and somebody does decide to take a chance and not reline it, well, they have a perfectly good stretcher. Now, stretching an oval painting isn't really much more difficult than a square painting, except for the fact that there's no starting point or stopping point. So you kind of have to bounce around, almost like you tighten the lugs on a car wheel, or how you build a bicycle wheel. You don't start in one place and work all the way around. You do a little bit, and then you go across, do a little bit, and then across, and then do a little bit, and across, and do a little bit, and so on and so forth. It's like you're making a star or ping-ponging around this circle. And that ensures that you get even tension throughout, and that you're not pulling it too much in one direction. If you just start in one place and work around, you can distort the canvas. Again, not really a big deal here, because we have an interleaf, but it's good practice, and it's the way that I do it. So there's no reason why I wouldn't continue to do it. I'm going to trim off all of this excess canvas and trace the contour of the stretcher. It's hard because there are all of these little ripples, but I don't need to be super, super precise. I'm going to fold over the edge to create a nice clean edge. Now, tacking the back of an oval stretched painting is a little bit more complicated than a square one. As I go along and fold over, I have to create little overlaps or pleats to compensate for the excess material. But if I do it properly, and I do it deliberately, and I do it from each side working out, well, it looks really, really clean and really good. Now, I'm putting the keys back in this stretcher because they belong there, and they'll help hold the stretcher together, but they're not actually going to tension out this canvas. So again, this isn't totally, totally necessary, except for the fact that it will hold the stretcher in place. And as always, I'm going to bind these keys with a little bit of fishing line so that if they come out, if they become loose because of humidity changes, they won't get lost or fall in between the canvas and the stretcher support in that gap that we created and create a bulge. With the painting reunited to its support and looking like a painting now, at least from the back, the front doesn't look so great, I can start thinking about the fill-in work that I need to do in preparation for the retouching. Wherever there has been paint lost, I can fill in with a putty, and this is going to ensure that the surface matches the surrounding surface, that there aren't divots or gaps. And this is critically important because if we don't do this step, when we do the retouching, if the retouching is good, well, you'll still see the damage because it will have a textural difference. Now, you can see I'm being really deliberate about being smooth here, and there's a reason for that here. But in other areas, right here on the hand, I'm going to lay on the fill-in material a little bit thicker, and then once I've gotten enough and gotten good coverage, I'm going to come back with a brush and I'm just going to start following the brushwork in the rest of the hand through the fill-in medium to create texture that matches. There's no science here. This is pure craft and art and kind of fun, but creating this texture in this fill-in medium is critically important because this is what's going to allow the retouching to really blend in. When the fill-in was applied, it was done so liberally, and the reason is because it's easy and fast and it gets the job done. But I have to come back and remove the excess. It's simply not okay to leave all of this extra fill-in on the painting. A, it's not the right texture. The removal process allows me to refine and make it smooth or or not smooth, and also it's covering up original paint. You can see right here that it would cover up some of that forehead, and I need to remove that because I don't want to cover up any of the original. I also want to make sure I don't soften up or remove any of the texture that I worked so hard to create. Now, if I do, because it's somewhat inevitable, I can come back with little dental tools or scalpels and rework that texture so that it matches. Worst case scenario, I can always start over. While the hand was easy to sculpt with a bristle brush, the face had a little bit more delicate of a texture. So I'm coming in with some thick medium, and I'm going to use a brush, kind of an old ragged brush that's got a lot of the bristles kind of bent and chewed up, and I'm going to come in and create brushwork. And I'm doing this kind of in accord with what I think the painting is going to look like, so that when I do the retouching with a very thin medium that doesn't allow me to create texture, it will rest upon this texture and look natural. I'm taking a big gamble here, because if it's not right, it's going to look really, really wrong. But I think I'll get it. Now, before we do the retouching, I'm going to be applying a synthetic resin isolation layer. And there are tons of reasons for doing this, and a lot of confusion about why I do it sometimes and not other times. For this painting, I'm doing it so that I can see the colors more clearly. These really dark colors are hard to retouch without a varnish on them, and this resin layer will allow me to see what they'll look like when varnished, so I can better match the colors. This will also help avoid some of the desaturation that happens when the retouching medium goes over the fill-in medium. And now on to the most difficult, most exciting, most challenging, most rewarding, and most frustrating part of the process, the retouching. This is where I get to recreate what was lost, and that's really exciting, but also really difficult, because I don't know what was there, and if I don't do a good job, everyone will see it. Now here on this hand, it's kind of easy. There's a lot of texture, both physical and visual. There are a lot of colors happening. And so it's not terribly, terribly difficult to see what should be there and what's missing, and also it's not terribly difficult to recreate. This is a really loosely painted part of the painting, and so it lends itself to a looser style of retouching. But that's one of the cool things about retouching, is that you have to be able to assume multiple styles and kind of have multiple personalities. If the painting is super precise, you have to be super precise. If the brushwork is really controlled, so too must you. But if it's loose, well, you get to be a little loose, and that just feels really, really good. If the hand was relatively simple, well, I hope the face will be as well, but it's a different project. A lot more high consequence. This, of course, is the face, and everyone will look at it. It's the most important part of the painting, arguably. And there is a lot of damage. One whole eye is pretty much gone. The eyelid, the forehead, the cheek, part of the nose. So there's a lot of material missing. But what I'm really lucky with here is that there is a lot of material on either side. And so I can kind of bridge the gap. I can take the eyebrow from the left and carry it across the gap to the right. I can do the same thing with the eye, the bags under his eye, the cheek, the nose, so on and so forth. And really this is a process of adding, taking a step back, and then editing. Either removing something, or adding more, or changing the color, or adding a little bit of texture. And there's really no proper way to do this. You don't start in one corner and work to the other corner. It's not like writing a paper, top to bottom, left to right. You kind of bounce around, and sometimes you do that based on the color that's on your brush. Sometimes you just need to take a break from one spot and work on another spot. There's really no rhyme or reason. The big question, however, is what is going to go here. And I have to make my decisions based on what is here, not what was here. No, I cannot use the image of the painting as I received it as a proper template for retouching. Because that was somebody else's interpretation of what this face looked like. And to some degree, some of that work was excessive and overpainting, and changed the very nature of this face. My guess is that it was probably easier for the person who worked on this last to just repaint much of the face than it was for them to do retouching in the way that we as conservators understand it. Minimal, restrained, and limited only to the areas where the paint is lost. That's much harder. But it's the right way to do it. And because of that, I cannot trust that the old work was actually accurate. So I have to take my cues from the painting itself. But as I do, we can start to see it come together. Now, one thing about the retouching that I'm doing now is that this is effectively what's called mimetic or integrated retouching. And I am looking to make all of the damage simply disappear. There are other ways of doing retouching. Some that acknowledge the damage and kind of blend it in or tone its effect down. Some that don't try to recreate the image, just try to lessen the catastrophic effect of half of a face missing. But this is what my client wanted. And so this is the approach that I am taking. Remember, I don't own these paintings. I work for people who own them, and they get a say in how I work. I can certainly advise them one way or the other. I can encourage them. I can educate them. But they still make the final decisions. I'm a technician working for the artist, for the painting, and for my clients. Now, every so often you'll see me come with a cotton ball and go over the surface of the painting. Right there, for example. And what I'm doing is taking a little bit of spirits, a little bit of solvent, and covering the painting. And what it does is it saturates up the retouching paints, which have a tendency to dry a little bit more matte and lighter than they go on wet. And so I want to keep them wet so that I can see what I've done and see if it matches. If I only retouch according to the dry look, well, then I'm going to keep retouching and it's never going to look right. But you can see that when I do go over it with that cotton ball, everything gets darker and kind of unifies. And that's precisely what I'm looking for when I do that. It's kind of a nice cheat sheet for how it's going to look. Now, this is just the first pass of retouching. I will come back in a day or two or three and take a second pass and maybe even a third or fourth, fifth if necessary. Sometimes it's critical to take a step back from retouching after the first pass, just so that you can get some distance from it and come back and have a fresh set of eyes. This is retouching. We can always remove it if we don't like it. But there's no reason to let it leave the studio unless you're completely satisfied. After several more rounds of retouching, and yes, revisiting that face multiple times, I was satisfied. And that means I get to now apply the final varnish. This is also a synthetic resin layer. I don't use natural resins anymore because they are fallible and present problems in removal. The synthetic resin comes off very easily and it is ultraviolet stabilized. So it is less inclined to yellow over time. I've chosen to apply this via brush because the painting is still of a manageable size and applying it via brush allows me to kind of affect the varnish as it's drying. In furniture conservation and finishing, this is called brushing out. And so I too will call it brushing out. As the varnish sits on the surface and the solvent evaporates, the resin becomes thicker, denser, and tackier. And as it does that, I can keep crossing the surface with my brush, which is just a simple bristle brush. It's not an incredibly smooth one. And I can create a microtexture. This microtexture allows the light to diffuse when it hits the surface as opposed to being a really glossy smooth surface. This is kind of a glossy crystalline surface or microtextured. And that creates a really beautiful velvety glittery sheen. Yes, I can affect this change if I spray the varnish, but it's much easier if I use a brush. And that's my preferred method of applying the varnish. Every once in a while a little fuzz needs to be picked out, but we're looking good. With the work complete on the painting, well, we can finally start to see what it should look like. Underneath all of that old grime, that discolored varnish, the heavy, heavy, and excessive layer upon layer of overpainting, well, there was a pretty painting hiding. It took a lot of work to reveal it, but I think the results were well worth it. We can see a more accurate representation of Saint Francis's face with much more restrained and much more color appropriate and matching retouching. The textural differences are gone. The fill-in was successful, the inlay was successful, and the modeling of the brushwork has made the repairs completely invisible. In the areas where there were paint loss, the extra time spent to sculpt the fill-in medium really goes a long way into helping your eye just see the painting and not the damage. Subtle colors were revealed that were completely obfuscated. Delicate whites and greens, pinks in the hands, and also other details that were missing before, like the skull, have been revealed. And now we can get a better sense of the complete picture, not just bits and pieces of it like before. The back of the painting also received some attention. The lining was successful, the stretcher was repaired, it was cleaned, it was modified to be a little bit more aesthetically pleasing, and of course to remove that canvas from the surface of the support, thus giving it a longer life. When the painting first arrived at the studio and I took a look at it and understood what I was facing, my expression of, oh brother, was not unfounded. As I revealed the extent of the damage and how much work was ahead of me, well, I felt like saying, ay brother. But, of course, with patience and focus and careful work, seeing the painting as it is now, we can step back, revel in its mastery, and say, oh brother.