Hot Mess Makeover Part 1

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Unfortunately, ultraviolet light and visible light will never tell us the why, the rationale and reasoning behind some of these decisions, if ever there was. And for this painting, there is a lot to understand. Circled in red are areas of new retouching that are sitting atop the old varnish. These fluoresce very strong, and you can see the liberties taken. Repainting the bow, blending in the area above her shoulder, this is not good work. The areas in yellow are old retouching. They fluoresce, but not as strongly. This is historic, and obviously the hand of a different conservator. Again, very liberally applied. And if we take off all of this, one thing that strikes me is what remains and what doesn't. You can see here, the area in blue has been cleaned. At least some of the old varnish has been removed. And the area of blue squiggle, well, that's all old varnish that was never removed. Yeah, only the area in yellow was cleaned. Taking a look at her face, we can see this outline even more clearly. As I trace her face in blue, we can see a bluish-greenish haze on the background, and even on part of her eye. This is old varnish that was never removed. Even here, by her nose and on her lip, we can see the remnants of old varnish. Someone didn't clean the entire painting, just her face. And here, in red, I'll begin to circle areas of old retouching. And you can see that there are a lot. So many, in fact, that it may be easier to just circle the areas where there isn't retouching. It will probably result in less circling. So these areas in yellow, where you can see a little bit lighter paint, this is the original paint. There is no overpaint on this area. But as you can see, as I continue to highlight these areas, there is not much of her face that hasn't been touched by somebody's hand. Now, whether this was necessary or not remains to be seen. But one thing that is clear, this painting is a hot mess and will require, well, at least a pretty radical makeover. You know, one of the benefits of using a blacklight is that it allows me to see past the facade to what's really going on underneath the surface. And with this painting, I have discovered some serious problems. I'll fix them. That's what I do. But I'll tell you, wouldn't it be nice to pull back the curtain and discover that things were done the right way? Well, with Squarespace, they are. And that's because Squarespace has done the heavy lifting for you. With their fluid design engine and their AI-powered design intelligence software, you don't need to know any code to build a beautiful and mobile-friendly website that works everywhere. Simply using drag-and-drop technology, you can design and build your website. And Squarespace's AI can help you make it better with no experience necessary. But if you do run into a problem, Squarespace has thought of that too. With online tutorials, articles, videos, webinars, and a robust forum filled with thousands of people just like you working through and solving problems just like yours. So head over to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. If we return to the painting and look at it under visible light, well, the problems become crystal clear. All of what we saw under UV light reveals itself here as well. Lots of sloppy overpainting and retouching. Stuff that doesn't even look accurate. Areas that have been completely repainted and, well, stand out as a different hand than the original. The face looks flat and without life. Her hair is just an amorphous blob. The lacework is, well, hardly there anymore. We can see losses and crude attempts at recreating this delicate lacework. And all of this stands out. It catches our eye and breaks the delicacy of the image. This is not what we want. And not what the artist, sitter, or painting deserve. In addition, the background is very textured, almost like alligator skin, which is odd and stands in contrast to the relatively smooth and sometimes over cleaned and skinned areas of the painting. That skinning continues to the face where we can see the texture of the canvas and, again, lots of overpaint trying to cover that error throughout. In addition, there are losses and flaking around the edges. Areas that certainly need to be addressed. And to top it all off, the painting has been crudely lined to a new piece of canvas. The original tacking edges unceremoniously cut off. And the lining canvas itself is failing. Rusted tacks, tears, and it's just not doing a good job of supporting this painting. And on top of which, it's not even a real canvas. It's just a fabric. So, we have work ahead of us. Before I do anything with this painting, I'm going to face it with Japanese paper. This is washikozo, a mulberry paper that is incredibly strong. And instead of using a water-based adhesive, here I'm using a solvent-based adhesive. It provides a little bit stronger of a grip and it dries significantly faster, which allows me to get to work, well, faster. And there is a lot of work ahead of me, so I don't want to waste any time. After the adhesive has been heated up and thinned out to a consistency that I know will work on this painting, I apply it to the face of the painting and then I lay down the sheet of paper into that adhesive. I rub it with my hands to make sure that there's good contact and then I'll continue on with the rest of the facing. Once all the paper is on the painting, I'll come back with the adhesive and paint it on the surface of the paper, making sure that it penetrates through the paper and that there's an incredibly strong bond between the painting and the paper. This is a little bit slower than using a water-based or fish gelatin adhesive, but for this painting, which is relatively small, it's kind of a wash. The time spent here will be saved in the drying process, which for this will be maybe 20 minutes and for the fish gelatin adhesive might be a full day. Once that's dried, 20 minutes later, I can begin removing the painting from its support. And here I'm just using a little tool to pull out all of the tacks and the nails. Luckily here, there are no staples, there are no hidden tacks, and there is no adhesive gluing this canvas down to the stretcher. In fact, many of these tacks are rusted and decomposing and so they either break or pull right out, which is good for me, not so great for the painting. Now this painting has been lined and I very easily could just cut the lining off and separate the painting that way, but I would still need to remove all of these old tacks eventually, so I figure may as well do it now. Again, it's a small painting so it doesn't take too much time. On a larger painting, I might have just cut it right off. And once all the tacks are out, I can separate the stretcher from the canvas. This stretcher is pretty good and I'll probably reuse it, but it does need a good cleaning. It's covered with all sorts of old adhesive. This lining canvas, or fabric because it's not actually canvas, needs to be removed. And to do that, I'm going to start by peeling off the corner to see if I can do that rather than using a scalpel. And it looks, at least thus far, like it will cooperate. Anytime I can peel the canvas off the back, it's much easier than having to use water or solvent or scalpel. But it's also indicative of relatively low quality work. You see, this lining has effectively failed. The bond between the lining canvas and the adhesive is no longer sufficient, so this wasn't done very well. And I kind of knew that going into it because canvas wasn't used. A fabric was. And anybody who's lining a painting ought to know better than to use regular fabric. That's why we use canvas. It's incredibly strong and it's designed for paintings. In any event, I'll work to continue separating this canvas from this fabric, trying to do it in one piece, though it is starting to tear. This old fabric is very, very oxidized and has deteriorated quite a bit, making it very, very brittle. And so while I'm able to remove large chunks of it by pulling, there is some that remain stuck to the original canvas. And to remove that, I'll either use a palette knife or a scalpel to slide under the edge and then peel it off. Ultimately, the scalpel proves to be a little bit more effective. And I don't need to slice all of this off. I just need to get some purchase so that I can peel it off. This takes a little bit more time, but still doing it dry is more effective than wetting the canvas. If I did that, the fabric would probably deteriorate, the glue would reactivate and become mushy, and I would then have to deal with all of the moisture that's been introduced to this canvas. And when you introduce moisture to canvas, you can cause all sorts of intended and unintended consequences. The canvas can warp and distort, it can curl, it can shrink, it can cause the paint layer to detach. So avoiding moisture is always preferred. Once all of that fabric is off, now I have to remove the adhesive. And again, I'm going to try to do this dry. Instead of using laponite or water, I'm just going to scrape with my scalpel. And you can see the glue is very, very brittle and didn't really penetrate into the original canvas. It's sitting on the surface, which again is indicative of a relatively poor lining. But this is good for me. Sometimes poor work is our best friend. Because the glue is so brittle, all I have to do is run my scalpel along the edge and sort of bulldoze it off of the original canvas. This scalpel blade is not terribly sharp. I'm not looking to slice anything off. In fact, sharp scalpels here could be problematic. I want a dull edge and I want to just glide across and using tension, force that old glue to separate. It goes relatively quickly, or at least I thought it was going quickly, until I looked up and realized that I had spent the past four and a half hours scraping glue. It probably would have been removed faster had I used laponite and water. But it might not have given as consistent or safe results. And in this case, the priority is the painting, not my time. This is my job after all. And if I have to spend four hours or eight hours scraping, so be it. Eventually, all of the adhesive does come off and I'm left with a bare canvas with no big tears, no big holes, no deterioration, no reason for it to have been lined. So I'm not sure why that decision was made. While the facing was necessary to protect the painting in the case of a big tear or really rough scraping, it is now no longer needed so it can be removed. And unlike the fish skeleton, which requires water, this uses a solvent. Now this solvent does not have any effect on the painting's varnish or the painting itself. This was designed by the chemists specifically for this reason. Once the solvent has had some time to soften up the adhesive, the paper can be peeled off the surface and it comes off relatively easily, hopefully in one sheet. What's left behind is just the adhesive. And as it sits with the solvent, it continues to swell, absorbing that solvent and getting softer and softer and slowly detaching from the face of the painting, which is precisely what we want, because all of that adhesive will need to be removed. Using some cotton balls and some solvent, I can lift up all of that adhesive and then the painting will be free of everything I've added. But it is now time to begin cleaning this painting. I made tests before I started and determined that there was very little, if any, surface grime, but lots of old varnish. And as we saw under UV, lots of overpainting and old retouching. Starting in the corner here in a dark area, I'll begin lifting off the old varnish and the old overpainting. And what I'm finding is fill-in, specifically fill-in where there were losses. The original canvas and painting have come under some trauma. And as you can see, there is very little left of the original painting. But what I am seeing, and what's really exciting here, is looks like there's actual lace that was overpainted. You can see right here, this delicate detail was completely obscured by that overpaint. Whoever decided to restore this painting not only did a lousy job, they did a terrible job by covering up what was the artist's original work, a cardinal sin in conservation. It's clear that whoever worked on this painting did not know what they were doing and had no business being mere paintings. As I continue to remove old varnish and old overpainting, the picture gets a little bit more complete and the extent of the damage becomes clear. This painting was very, very poorly treated prior to the conservation and then during the attempted conservation. Many bad things happened here. And you can see that the attempt to recreate what was lost, well, it was just sloppy. This little fringe and lace never looked good and it was clear that it was retouching, and it clearly was, as it comes off with a very easy pass of solvent. I will continue to clean this painting with rolled spobs and solvent and unearth more loss, more overpaint, and more sins of the past. But for this painting, I'm going to do something slightly different. I'm going to only clean half. Only the left half will have the old varnish and old overpainting removed. I'll leave the right half as is because I want to take a look at it under UV and see if it's going to be more instructive. As I continue to clean this painting and reveal subtle details that were completely obscured by the old overpainting, I am shocked. There is really delicate lace and fringe that was just painted over black. There are what appears to be embroidery marks that were completely covered by gray. The bow was completely overpainted. Her earring, overpainted. Her necklace, overpainted. Just about every part of this painting has overpaint on it. And it's clear that this painting was very damaged and that may be the reason why there is so much overpaint, but there is no reason for this level of overpaint. Damage can be retouched, but to be simply overpainted is not okay. Now, whenever it comes to the background and the darker colors, I'm always weary because, as I have found very often, these are just simply overpainted in brown or black and a lot of overpainting is coming off. But luckily, it still looks okay. I'm not finding the same level of losses in the background as I found on her and her clothing. Which, at least for now, makes me feel somewhat more confident. Her hair is not great. There is a lot of loss, and I kind of expected that. But I'll take that for the win on the background. At least right now I'm taking that win. I have a sneaking suspicion that that may change going forward, but at least for now, ignorance is bliss? Yeah, ignorance is bliss. We'll stick with that. Moving on to her face, I suspect more of the same. The lace that was covering her forehead, well, that was all a construction of the past added by some conservator or artist or somebody who thought that it was a good idea to add that to the painting. So that will come off. Her entire face has been glazed in. We saw that on UV, but the extent of the glazing and the damage is pretty shocking. There is so much overpaint on this painting. Really, it's less of an original painting than it is a construction. The ear, well, that's overpaint. Completely overpainted. There is no ear here. As I move down to the rest of her face, I suspect that it's going to be more of the same, and it does not disappoint. Lots and lots of losses, lots of skinning and damage, and yes, lots and lots of overpainting and glazing. Attempts to cover up this damage and make the painting whole or better that have, well, flattened it and taken away any delicacy or nuance that the artist created when they made this painting. And that's really disappointing, because underneath all this, I suspect there's a really beautiful painting just waiting for her makeover. Looking at the half-cleaned painting under UV, we can see there's a pretty big change. Half of it's clean, the left half, and the red line is the delineating point. But now, being selected in red, if you look on the left side, the whole background, well, it appears a little different. It's looking a lot like the fluorescing of the old retouching that we saw on the rest of the painting. Areas like this, and over here too. Which leads me to believe I need to do a little bit more investigating. Take a closer look at that background, and make sure I don't leave any stone unturned. So, I'll apply a little bit of solvent gel to the edge of the painting, and instantaneously the gel is going from clear to brown, which tells me there is overpaint still on the background. I'll agitate it, let it sit for a little bit, do its work, and then I'll come back with a swab and some solvent, and I'll begin removing that gel, and, well, whatever, it's lifted off. And I can see right away that there's red overpaint and fill-in material. But what I'm not seeing is that alligator texture. It appears that all of that unpleasant texture was just overpaint that was laid on on top of the background, too thick, and when it dried, it shrunk and cracked. So that's a positive, and I'm grateful for that. Because after cleaning the entire painting and the background, this is what remains. The entire painting was overpainted. The background simply painted brown to cover up the losses. The lace on her clothing, overpainted. Her hair, overpainted. Her veil, overpainted. Necklace, bow, overpainted. Just about every part of this painting was overpainted, resulting in a caricature of the original. Everyone who touched this painting did it wrong and turned it into a hot mess. But now, in my studio, it's time for the makeover. So come back next time to see how we put her together.