Fortune Favors the Fold

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Very carefully, I attempted to unfold this painting and see just what we were dealing with. And to my surprise, it wasn't as bad as I had thought. Certainly not good, but it could have been so much worse. A portrait of a woman, folded, creased, torn, a bit worse for wear with what appears to be some water damage on the bottom edge. Lots of flaking, lots of creases, lots of planar distortions, a few tears, a few holes, and paint loss scattered throughout. But by and large, the painting was stable, sound. And like I said, it could have been exponentially worse. Now the fact that the damage goes through the face, well, that's not great. And the amount of losses on the bottom edge, also not great. But this we can work with. This we can put back together. And while it may appear to be an uphill battle, fortune favors the fold. Doing these hard things is one of the ways we can prove to ourselves that we are still able to grow and tackle new challenges. 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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. When I removed this painting from its packaging, I thought I caught what looked like some old adhesive or a patch on the back of the canvas. So now it's time to find out if I was right. So once I flipped this piece using two pieces of acid-free foam core, and hopefully nothing has fallen off. Phew, looks like everything stayed put. I can see that, yes, there are some signs of old work on the back, particularly a massive wax residue. It looks like maybe there was a patch there at some point, or maybe not. And then of course the telltale signs of staining. This is the water marks from the front that have caused all that paint to flake. I suspect at one point there was a patch adhered to the back of this canvas with the wax, but at some point it peeled off or was removed, and it was probably put on for a very very small hole, something that really didn't need a patch of this scale, but that's not terribly uncommon. Now to remove this wax, I'm going to bring the painting back to the hot table, and I'm going to try to work smart instead of hard, and allow the heat of the hot table to soften up all of this wax so it's easier to remove. The good thing is that this was likely just wax and not a wax-resin mixture, which is what would have commonly been used by professional conservators to do a lining or a patch. But people who didn't know about the resin part of the wax-resin mixture just use wax. Now wax is a wonderful thing, but an adhesive it is not. The resin in the wax-resin mixture is critically important not only for rigidity, but for stickiness. It helps the wax be more than a release agent. Now once the wax is heated up just a little bit, I'm not looking to melt it. I don't want it to be absorbed by that canvas. I'm just looking to soften it so it's a little bit easier to scrape off. I can begin scraping, and here I'll just use a scalpel, and I'll gently glide across the back of the canvas, and you can see that the wax releases fairly easily. Now this takes a couple of minutes, not terribly long, to remove the majority of the wax, and on this cool, cool day, it's not so bad working on top of the heated vacuum tape. Once I've gotten the mass of the wax removed, I can come back with some solvent, and I can try to remove some of the excess. When wax is warm, it becomes soluble with several different types of solvents, and we can lift it off. When it's cool and hardened, it's much, much more difficult, which is why heating it up is critically important to removing it in this method. It takes a couple passes, introducing solvent, and then using some new cotton balls to absorb the wax-solvent mixture, and do it again, and do it again, and do it again, and then eventually we have all of the wax removed. With all of that wax now removed, I can take the painting off of the hot table and prepare it for the first of the hot table treatments that are to come, the vapor treatment, and this is going to expose the painting to both moisture, heat, and pressure via the hot table, and that's going to soften up the canvas fibers and allow me to return this painting into a flat state. We want to remove all of these planar distortions, the wrinkles, the ripples, the waves, all of this unpleasant stuff that we have on this painting, and return it to a flat state so that we can proceed with the lining and then with the rest of the conservation. So once I have laid the painting out on a new piece of blotter paper, I'll put the mylar on top, and then I will tape it down to make sure it's airtight, and then I'll install the through-bag vacuum connectors and the extraction ports, and this just allows me to use the vacuum table to extract all of the air that's trapped in this envelope. Once that air is extracted, there will be positive pressure on the painting's face, pressing it down onto that blotter paper. The painting will be heated up, and then it will be allowed to cool, and then it will be in a flat state. I'll use a bone folder and some other tools to encourage it flat. Sometimes this helps with the process and also gives me a little bit of granular control over what areas get more pressure. Once the painting has cooled to room temperature, I'll remove the tape and remove the painting from this envelope, and I can transfer it over to the drying table where it will be pressed for a few days, and this is critically important because there's still ambient moisture in this canvas, and if we don't dry it under weights and keep it flat, it will curl up and distort again, which will nullify the procedure that we've just done. A piece of felt on the surface protects the painting, and then down comes another board and a fancy old cinder block or two, and then after it sits for a couple of days, I can remove it from these weights, and I can see that the painting is nice and flat. The raking light helps show that, and then I'll take it over to the other table where I'm going to prepare it for an interleaf lining. Now, there are many ways to do an interleaf, and for this painting, I've chosen to do my normal process but also add a layer in between the painting and the mylar film, and the reason that I'm going to do this is to give it a little bit more rigidity and support, particularly when I'm handling it. Remember, this painting is kind of folded and torn in multiple places, and I have to use this board to handle it. This piece of flat-spun nylon gossamer will provide some temporary support so that I can handle the painting, and also add some ancillary support and a glue matrix for the bonding process, and all that means is that it will allow a little bit thicker of a layer of adhesive that I'm going to apply now, which will ensure that the painting bonds really well to the PET film that will go in between the new canvas and the original canvas. An interleaf lining is made up of several layers. On the top, we have the painting, then we have a rigid substrate, and this can be aluminum, this can be wood, this can be PET film, really anything that doesn't deform. I use PET film because it's lighter weight than all the others, and then we have the new canvas, which is really there just for cosmetic and functional purposes to allow us to stretch it. Once that adhesive layer has dried, I'll trim off the excess of this flat-spun nylon gossamer. It's not necessary. The little bit that's sticking out provides no real benefit, and I want to keep this a little bit cleaner. Not that I'm embarrassed about this being there, but we don't need to showcase it. And once I've trimmed that off of all of the four sides, I can begin preparing all of the other materials. I need to cut the PET film down, I need to cut my lining canvas, and I need to put adhesive film on the lining canvas, and then transfer the painting over to the lining canvas. Here, I'm aligning the PET film, and I'm tacking it down with the iron just to make sure it doesn't shift. We wouldn't be very happy if it moved. And then I'm putting the painting down onto the lining canvas, which already had the adhesive film ironed on. I'll tack it into place, and then bring it over to the hot table, which I have already heated up, and I'll lay the painting down onto a piece of release film. I'll put another piece of release film on top, just so that any areas of glue that maybe ooze out or were on the edges don't result in this painting getting stuck to the table or this top layer of mylar. I've done it in the past. It's not a problem, because we can reverse this adhesive. It's just kind of a pain and an unforced error, and I'd like to avoid those if I can. So, the same pressure and heat is brought down on this painting, but we don't have any added moisture. And here, we're just looking to activate the adhesive. Once it's brought up to temperature, it will be active, and then we can cool it. And then, once it's done and removed from the hot table, we can take off all of the excess adhesive. Because this painting had lots of tears and holes, the adhesive oozed through them and settled on the surface. And so, by applying a little bit of solvent, we can swell that adhesive. You can see it happening here. And then, we can simply rub it off. That's one of the great things about this modern conservation adhesive, is that it's designed to be reversible. And the solvent that I'm using here to remove this adhesive doesn't have any adverse effect on this painting. But, just to be sure, I always test beforehand. There's a lot of things that happen before I work on a painting that don't necessarily get shown here in the video, because, well, they're just kind of boring and not all that interesting. And I know you're saying, I want to see them, I want to see them. Well, sometimes I'll show them. Maybe the next time. But for now, what I want to show is what I see with my naked eye that leads me to believe that there's something fishy about this painting. So, we're going to take a look at it under ultraviolet light. Reading a painting under UV light is as much art as it is science, but what I can see right away are lots of brush strokes, both on her clothing and then up here in the background, both vertical and horizontal throughout the painting. And that's old varnish that was never removed. But more interesting is what I'm seeing around her face. It looks like there's a halo, particularly down by her cheek. You'll see it here in red. There's a light glow touching her face that quickly transitions to a darker area. That darker area is overpaint that's fluorescing, and the lighter area is the original background. It's here too on the left side, and that indicates to me that the entire background has been overpainted, but they were just a little too timid to get right up to her face, so they kind of feathered it in and thought nobody would notice. Well, that's never what we want to see, but I've been doing this long enough to know that that's probably the case. In either event, we're going to remove it because it doesn't belong there. Now, hopefully when we do remove it, we find that the painting is good, that it's not heavily damaged underneath, but again, we never know. So, using a solvent that I've already tested, I can remove this top coat of overpainting. Now, I've decided to switch to a gelled solvent. This is going to allow me to apply this gelled solvent the same as the free solvent I tested just earlier with the swab, and it's going to allow it to sit a little bit longer without evaporating. And then I can come back with my swab and remove all that overpaint and the gelled solvent. Now, the gelled solvent is a really wonderful thing. It allows us to apply this without evaporating, without running, and gives us more exposure time without scrubbing the painting, which is really helpful. So, now on to the rest of the painting. And I'm optimistic here because my initial tests revealed that there isn't anything catastrophically wrong... yet. And I'm hopeful that that remains true because I don't want to find a situation where, on top of all of these tears and creases and all these things that I have to deal with, there's massive loss, which would mean more retouching. And that's because retouching is really the most time-consuming aspect of this project. Any project, really. It's slow-going, it's tedious, it is very, very high energy. Even though I'm just sitting there, it takes a lot of mental focus and capital to retouch well. And so, the more retouching that a painting has, the less I can work on it, the longer the project takes, and for the clients, usually, the more it costs. And while that's a decision for them to make, I am mindful of my clients' pocketbooks. I try to give them fair prices and to treat them and their paintings with respect, knowing that finances are always tight for everybody, no matter when, why, how, or who. And the more they can save on a project, the better it is for them. Now, right there, I have uncovered a small little tear. And we knew that was there because we saw it on the back. But if that's the reason that this whole background was overpainted, I'm just kind of gobsmacked. Now, of course, we would hope and expect that that retouching would be small and limited to just that little tear above her head. But we've come to know that that's not always the case, that people get careless, or they get liberal, or they just don't know any better, and they start blending out the area around the damage. But to overpaint the entire background for that little, let's call it a three-quarter inch tear, would be, well, I'd have to put that in the record books for the most overpainting for the smallest amount of damage. Now, there was another little piece of damage that I just uncovered, but still, to overpaint this whole painting just because of that is just kind of ridiculous. Anyhow, besides those two things, I'm not finding any major catastrophic losses or damage on this painting, which, thank goodness, I have enough to deal with as is. Now, when I get down to her dress, there is also a lot of overpaint. In fact, it looks like somebody just kind of editorialized on her dress, gave her some pleats, some, I don't know, detail, but it all comes off relatively easily. And it shouldn't be there. It's overpainting, it's not part of the original, and no matter how much, I suppose, quote-unquote, better it makes it look, the artist didn't do it, and therefore, it doesn't belong on the artist's work. And that's why we're removing it. Our job as conservators is not to make paintings better, but to make them more like themselves, to remove damage, and to the degree that we have to fix problems, we do so with as little invasive procedures as possible, and as light touch as we can. To recreate something excessively or liberally is just a bridge too far. Coming to her face, there's not a lot of overpaint, which I'm grateful for. There's a little bit of old varnish and a little bit of grime that's kind of underneath that varnish, but we don't have any real, real problems. I mean, aside from the massive tear through her cheek and her face, but that's for later. For now, the painting looks pretty clean. While I was cleaning it, I did notice, however, that there were some areas that need more attention. Those two areas of damage that I spotted, they have some fill-in material and old oil paint on them that I need to remove with the scalpel. Now, I could certainly try to remove these with the solvent gel, repeated applications over and over again, or by scrubbing it, but that's aggressive, and I can do it with the scalpel pretty safely, and it means that the area surrounding this damage won't get exposed to any more solvents or any more abrasion. Now, choosing whether it's right to use a scalpel, a dental tool, or a solvent is one that is up to the conservator, and we make the best decisions based on the evidence and what we know about the painting, and second-guessing it, it's just kind of armchair quarterbacking. Once the painting has all of the grime removed, it's time for fill-in. This is necessary because there are areas that are lower or divots from when the paint was lost, and if we don't fill these in, one, we're going to have bare canvas to retouch on, and the paint isn't going to stick as well. It's going to get absorbed really fast, and two, you're going to see those divots when the raking light hits the painting. Even if we match the color perfectly, if the texture isn't right, it's going to reveal the damage, and that, well, it may be better, but it won't be as good as it possibly could. So all of these little areas of loss need to be filled in, and there are quite a lot of them. Once that fill-in medium has been allowed to dry, we'll let it dry for a couple of days. I can come back and remove the excess. You'll see that I was very liberal with my application of the fill-in, and again, every conservator gets to decide what's right for them. Some will spend hours just applying it to those areas where there's loss, and that's fine. I prefer to apply it liberally and then remove the excess. That's what works for me. In the end, we both will end up with the same thing. Areas of loss that have been filled in, and the remaining fill-in removed from the surface of the painting. And here, instead of using a swab, I'm using a shop towel that's been dampened, and I'm just kind of gliding over the surface and picking up the excess. This is possible because this painting is really, really smooth. If there was a lot of texture to this painting, this would not be the right approach. But here, it works. And it is now time to put this painting onto a stretcher. Because it came folded up and there was no support, we had a new support fabricated by our stretcher manufacturer, Simon Liu, in New York. I visited him when I did the behind-the-canvas to New York, and I got to see how these stretchers were made. And after seeing his shop and his employees, it gives me even more confidence that using his stretchers are the right choice when absolute precision is needed. These things go together like furniture. They're finished beautifully. And for me, that means that they're going to be predictable, and they're going to give the results that I want. Now, why I chose to use a stretcher instead of a strainer might be a question on the top of your mind. Because a stretcher allows us to add tension to a canvas, but an interleaved lining removes the ability of the canvas to stretch. That PET film to which it's bonded is rigid. That's true. But on the edges, there is no PET film, and the canvas can still get slack. And yes, the PET film can develop a wave or a ripple. So by using a stretcher, I can make sure that the area where the PET film is attached is always flat and under tension. Also, if in the future somebody decides that they want to remove this lining and take out the PET film and do a soft lining or another repair, well, they now have a stretcher to which they can marry this painting. So you're welcome, future conservative. Once all of the excess canvas is trimmed off, I can tack down the edges with some lightweight tacks. Always one of my favorite things to tidy up the back. You folks know this. And then when it comes time to the edges, I'll tack them under and tack them down to make sure that they're nice and crisp, and they look really good, and they have nice tight joints. Little things like this are a way that I can telegraph that care has gone into every aspect of this conservation, not just the front. And it's now time to put the keys in. They slide into little mortises, and then I tap them, and they expand the stretcher just a little bit. But even a 64th of an inch adds enough tension to take up the slack on the canvas and keep it taut. You can see right here, just that little amount opening up that stretcher adds enough tension on that soft canvas or on the edges, remember, to keep everything flat. And then, of course, we're going to bind to the keys so that they don't fall out and get lost or get themselves wedged in between the stretcher and the canvas and create a bulge. A little bit of fishing line and a tack, a hammer and scissors, and Bob's your uncle. And with the painting now married to the support, it all keyed out, it's filled in, it's time to prepare it for retouching. I could certainly just retouch on this painting as is, but I'm going to apply an isolation layer to this canvas, and I'm going to use a thicker one than I normally would. And part of the reason for that is even though I filled in all of those creases, they are big horizontal lines that run across the canvas. And that means that they are going to be more prone to catching the light and revealing themselves. Even if I do a really good job filling it in, there's always going to be a subtle difference, and I'd like to minimize that if possible. And by applying a higher viscosity or thicker resin, it will settle into some of those divots and smooth out the transitions. Instead of them being sharp right angles, maybe they're a bit more rounded, and they don't catch the light so strongly, and your eye doesn't go to them as quickly. But this is also really important because this resin kind of saturates the colors. Because it's a resin, the painting looks like it's been varnished. And then I can retouch and know that whatever paint I apply to the surface when it's wet, that's how it will look when I apply the final varnish. Even though sometimes the retouching paints dry a little bit lighter or darker, when they're wet, that's the color I'm trying to match. And without that resin, the painting would be a little bit washed out and dried out. And so I would likely match my colors to an inaccurate representation of the true colors on the painting. And then, when I went to apply the varnish, everything would change and all the retouching would be revealed. I know it's complicated and it doesn't really make sense. Perhaps one day I will do a demonstration and show you just how awry all of this can go. When I first saw this painting and all of the damage, I did not have a good feeling about it. Green is not one of my favorite colors to retouch. There are some colors that just make sense to me and I enjoy retouching them. Green is not one of them. And long horizontal tears and rips in a canvas are really, really hard to hide. So I was not feeling very good about this. But as I got into it, I started to get a groove. Things started to make sense. And part of that is because of the way the artist painted this background. It's not one solid green. In fact, there's lots of layers of different greens. You can see there's even some pinks and browns. And what that means is that there's a lot of different colors here, which makes the retouching a lot easier. Because instead of having to mix one solid green, I kind of just have to mix a lot of colors that, from a distance, compose this greenish background. And that is much easier than trying to match one color perfectly across a horizontal tear. So I was feeling pretty good about this. And I started to feel like maybe this would go much easier than I thought. You know, you have to hold out hope, right? So as I finished this first big tear across, I felt great. And I decided, why not start working on the face? Again here, if you look really closely, you can see that the face isn't one color. It's kind of marbled. There's a lot of colors and a lot of little differences there. And this is just such a pleasure to retouch. Instead of having to come up with a really smooth, transition-less layer of retouching, all of the little dots that I put down, the differences actually work in my favor, which is really great. Because this paint that I'm using, designed for conservation, does not blend well. It dries very, very fast. And you can't really smooth it out. So you have to do lots of little dots. And on really, really smooth transitions, it's really hard because those dots become visible. But on a painting like this, with the little differences in color, the dots, so to speak, are kind of how the artist painted it. Well, this is like a retoucher's dream. Now, I would have preferred there not to be a tear right through her face, but it could have been a lot worse. And so as I complete one of her cheeks, it's looking really good. I'm really satisfied with how this is coming out. And that gives me great confidence to complete the rest of the painting. Now, surprise, there is still a lot of retouching left to go. All of that dark blue-black in her shirt, which I will tell you was not very easy. I didn't film it because it wasn't very interesting, but it took actually significantly longer than I anticipated. But, you know, you get a win in one area, you have to take a little bit of adversity in the other. It all balances out in the end, or at least you hope it does. Sometimes there are projects that go with you, and sometimes there are projects that go against you. And when you have a project that goes against you, it is frustrating. But you have to remember that on the grand scheme of things, last week you had a project that went with you. So it all balances out. Maybe that's a Pollyannish way of thinking about things, but what's the alternative? Thinking that these paintings have personalities, and that they're doing this deliberately to spite you? I don't know. Stare at a painting long enough, and you start to get that feeling sometimes. At least with this one, she seemed to be cooperative, and want to be conserved. And for that, I am very grateful. Because when it came in, I was very, very nervous. And after completing all of that retouching, the good and the rough, it's now time for varnish. And here, I'm just going to be spraying on a light coat of varnish. Remember, we already have that thicker layer of resin on the painting, and I really just need a finish coat to change the sheen, to unify it all together, and to give it a little bit of ultraviolet protection. Also, just to make it look as good as it possibly can. And so here, I've chosen to spray it, because it's fast, it's easy, and it gives a really, really even layer. So, just a couple of quick passes, and I mean, that's pretty much it. Now, I did notice that something came out of the gun, and got stuck to the surface. And that needs to be removed, because otherwise, it will dry in the varnish. And then, I'll have to remove the varnish layer. So, using my scalpel, I'll just lift it off, and there we go. Everything is fine. Just to make sure, I'll apply another very thin coat of varnish, just making sure that I've got an even coating across the entire surface, and that I like the sheen. Now, to that end, I'm going to varnish it from a little bit higher up. Allow some of this varnish to dry in the air, so that when it hits the surface, it's a little bit more crystalline, and it doesn't just melt into the previous layer. Portraits are always one of my favorite things to work on. There's always an interesting relationship between the sitter and the artist, the artist and the viewer, and the viewer and the sitter. And determining what that relationship is, and how to interact with both the artist and the sitter, is really interesting and fun. And that's why I think portraiture is one of the greatest forms of painting. This portrait came in with lots of problems. Remember, back to when it arrived, it was folded up into many pieces. There were creases, there were tears, there was paint loss, there was water damage, there was old repairs. A lot of work needed to be done. And getting a good result was not a foregone conclusion. This particular type of work was really hard. It can be difficult to hide this type of damage. Crisp, clean, tears horizontally across the whole surface, large areas of smooth, relatively flat color. All of these things can make the conservation, well, tricky. But sometimes you get a painting that just wants to be conserved. It works with you. It's cooperative. It throws you a bone and helps you along the way. And for that, I feel eternally grateful. And looking at how this painting turned out, I am incredibly satisfied. Yes, the subtlety of the tears can be found if you are hunting for them. But if you're not, I would bet you wouldn't even notice that they were there. And that is a measure of success. Even in raking light, it's almost impossible to see where those tears and creases were. And so, by that metric, I'm calling this one done. Yikes. When she arrived, well, she was rough. But now, she's gorgeous. And I'm glad that I took on this project. I'm glad that my client sent it to me. Because in the end, fortune really does favor the fold.