Transcription
[Music] Having done this work for nearly 30 years, there is very little that shocks me anymore. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I have come across terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things done to innocent artworks. But even through all of those emotional ups and downs, copious amounts of frustrating work, and a general disappointment, when faced with disaster, I am still, never not surprised. And this painting is no exception.
When I mentioned terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things, this is what I was talking about. What was once a beautiful portrait of a woman has now been rendered a comical farce. Just about every inch of this painting has been covered in overpaint, sloppily, heavily handed, and by somebody who has no business touching or even looking at artwork. All of the delicacy of the artist's original work has been muddled, covered with sloppy overpaint. Staples because, of course, staples. And I wonder if the painting was ever even cleaned because I can see discolored varnish on the areas that weren't covered by overpaint. And it's one thing to retouch or glaze in where is necessary, but this is the peak of sloppiness. We can see fuzzy edges, imprecise repainting, and a covering up of well, everything, not to mention creative liberties taken where there should be none. This is hackery.
The beautiful oval stretcher which holds this painting together is broken in multiple places, and no attempt was made to repair it, which at this point should be considered a good thing. But it leads me to wonder just how bad the work on the front really is. You know, I'll be able to fix this, I think. But there are some things that I just can't fix. Like that busted website you've been holding on to for so long. From its antiquated design to its defunct technology, it's not a good reflection on you. So get with Squarespace and do yourself right. And with Squarespace's new design intelligence, it couldn't be easier. Based on over two decades of experience, they've built a comprehensive AI suite of tools to help you unlock your creative potential. Taking your inputs and scaling them up to allow you to build a beautiful, personalized, and dynamic website with no coding or design experience necessary, allowing you to focus on the content, your artwork, your store, your business, or your own piece of the worldwide web. So, head over to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/bombgardner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
So, here we go. Another disaster that needs to be fixed. And of course, the first thing that I need to do is take this all apart. And that begins by separating the canvas from its support. Here there are a plethora of staples and old rusted tacks that need to be pulled out. Apparently, when this hackery was done, they chose to use staples because that's the preferred tool of hacks. So, using my little tool, I will remove all of these staples, being careful to not tear any of this canvas. I'm going to preserve all of the paintings canvas and the tacking edge because it's original and we don't want to destroy it. Certainly, it would be easier to just cut it right off, but that's not how we do things here in the studio. With all of these staples now removed, I can ceremoniously transfer them over to the trash where they belong. And now, delicately, I'll lift up the edges just to make sure I didn't miss any tacks or staples. And I'll slide the stretcher or well pieces of the stretcher because remember it's broken and it's going to come apart in pieces out from underneath the painting. The stretcher will be set aside because we're going to save it. But it needs some repair work. For now, however, I'm going to focus on the painting itself. I'm going to flip it over and then clean off the back. When I flip it over, I allow the air cushion underneath the painting to support it. And you can see how when I dropped it on the table, it landed softly. Using a bristle brush, I'm going to start loosening up some of this accumulated dust and dirt. And you can see it's coming out of the canvas pretty well. But I've decided that I'm going to switch over to my vacuum because it's a little bit quicker. And this painting is really stable. Actually, it's really good condition. I mean, aside from all of the terrible things on the front, the back is really great. There's no flaking, no tears, no holes. The canvas isn't deteriorated, so I can use the vacuum to suck out all of this grime and dirt and dust that's on and in this fabric. Once that's done, I can transfer the painting back to the other side of the studio to the hot table, which I have prepared earlier, and begin the process of relaxing and flattening this canvas. There are lots of cracks in this canvas and this paint layer. And I want to see if I can remove some of them. Now, I can't get rid of cracks. Once the paint layer has cracked, it can't be uncracked, but I can mitigate the appearance by using heat, moisture, and pressure. So, on a warmed up hot table, I'll create an airtight envelope using a piece of mylar. I'll suck out all of the air with a vacuum pump, and then I'll allow the heat to start working on the surface of the painting. You can see just how cracked it is with the raking light. And so I'll take some tools here. I'm using a roller and then a bone folder. And we can see as I work the painting surface, those cracks come down.
While the painting is on the hot table, I can take this otherwise downtime and use it to focus on the support. Even though this oval support is broken in many places, we're not going to throw it away and replace it with a new one. This is the original support and we'd like to keep it. And not to mention, it's very expensive to make oval supports. But before I can repair it, I have to take all of these nails, tacks, and screws out. And look at this. We have six different types of nails, tacks, screws, brads. Sheesh. Now, repairing broken wood is not terribly complicated. Find the splits, clean the joints, prepare them, apply copious amounts of glue to both sides, and clamp them with adequate pressure to force a little bit of glue squeeze out. That's kind of it. And I'm not using any mechanical fasteners here because a good glue joint is as strong, if not stronger, than the wood itself. And mechanical fasteners would add complexity and not any real value to this simple repair.
While the stretcher is drying, I can return to the painting. I've removed it from weights where it's been sitting for a day and acclimatizing to the studio's relative humidity. And now I can prepare the adhesive for an adhesive impregnation. Generally, this is done when the painting is flaking very heavily. But because we don't know the condition of the original paint layer, it's underneath all of that overpaint. I'm doing this as a precautionary measure. The paint layer was very cracked. We saw that. That's why I chose to do the first treatment on the hot table to flatten it down and remove some of those distortions. But I don't know if the paint layer has detached from the canvas or from the ground layer and is being held in place by the retouching layer or overpaint. So doing this adhesive impregnation allows me to secure the paint layer back down and prevent any losses if there were to be any when I remove the overpaint. After applying the adhesive and allowing it to dry, I can take the canvas over to the hot table and create an airtight envelope with release film both on top and bottom to prevent the canvas from sticking to both the table or the top layer of film. I'll suck all the air out using my vacuum pump, turn the heat up, and let the adhesive liquefy, penetrate into all of those nooks and crannies, and begin the stabilization process. Again, I'll use my roller and bone folder to help encourage this paint layer down. One of the ancillary benefits of the impregnation is that it may help with the appearance of those cracks.
Once the painting is cool, we can get to what everybody has been waiting for, including myself, cleaning of this painting and removing all of this oil paint. I am both very excited and very nervous about what I am going to find. I am optimistic and hopeful because, well, I have to be, that underneath all of this chaos is a real painting, but we'll see. Using a solvent dipped swab, I can begin removing the overpaint. And the top layer comes off really, really easily. It's young and so it hasn't had time to oxidize and get hard. But what I'm seeing underneath is a very discolored layer of old varnish, and it's very thick. You can see here with the light raking along the surface, it's very smooth where the overpaint is and has a much finer texture where the original paint is. This indicates that there's a lot of material on here. So once again, the first pass removes the overpaint and then what remains is the old varnish. And that's a little bit trickier to remove. It's very old and very oxidized. So, it takes a little bit more work with the swab to soften up this layer and remove it, but it's coming off. And what I'm seeing is gobsmacking. I cannot believe that this is the color underneath this overpaint. Now, I've switched to a solvent gel because it's going to be a little bit more effective than using free solvents. There is so much overpaint on this painting that using the swabs would just take forever and it wouldn't necessarily be any better. So once the solvent gel is applied, I'll agitate it with my brush. It needs this agitation to penetrate through this thick layer of overpaint and through the old varnish. And then I'll remove it with a cotton ball dipped in solvent. And I am almost at loss for words. What I'm finding here is a background that is not only in fantastic condition, almost completely free of damage, but significantly more beautiful than what was on top. Generally, when we see whole backgrounds overpainted, they resemble what was the original, but here it's a totally different color. Instead of being this light color with greens and purples and some pinks, it's this muddy brown and green. And it doesn't look very good. It's dark. It's heavy-handed. And it's sloppy. But what lies beneath is something altogether beautiful. Yes, it's just the background, and I don't want to sound too over the top about it, but really, I was expecting there to be horrible, terrible, no good, very bad things under here. So, to find that there is a complete background that's not only in great condition, but also really lovely is, well, it's a huge relief. It means, at least for this part of the painting, I'm not going to have to do major reconstruction. And while that gives me hope for the rest of the painting, I've been doing this for long enough that I know not to get too far ahead of myself and take it one step at a time. But with the background fully cleaned, I am very satisfied.
So, I move on to her clothing. And surprise, it's also been overpainted. And this time with black paint. It was relatively shapeless and amorphous before. And what I'm seeing now is well, it was painted thinner. It's a little bit lighter. I can see some wrinkles and ripples in the fabric and it's got more texture. Now, we'll see how much of this is damage and how much of it is how the artist painted it. But again, we're starting to see some nuance come through that just wasn't there before. And yes, this is not the most important part of the painting, but every little bit counts, particularly when this is the result. Now, on to her collar. There is no massive overpaint here to be removed, just a lot of old varnish. And unfortunately, the damage here is pretty extensive. And this is going to require quite a bit of retouching by me. But one thing I am delighted to remove is this absolutely awful abomination of a stone. This doesn't belong here, and it gives me great delight to remove it. Now, onto her neck, and I'm starting to see some real damage. On the right side, we can start to see some pretty significant losses. The left side looks great, but I'm really concerned about what I'm seeing on the right and what that pretends for the rest of her face. But we'll get to there soon enough. First, I want to clean her hair. And again, this was completely overpainted in black. You can see all of that coming off on the swab. And for what? There's just a few little areas of loss. This is nothing terribly consequential. Nothing that can't be solved with a fine brush and 15 minutes of retouching. To overpaint it is just ridiculous.
Now, speaking of ridiculous, her face is just comically bad. The overpaint is not the right color. It's really sloppy and heavy-handed. It doesn't have any of the nuance or delicacy of the original. And yes, we can see some damage. But what I'm also seeing here is that it looks like her smile was changed. In fact, it looks like they gave her a smile, which is so problematic on so many counts. Now, onto her forehead. Again, we can see some really heavy crackleure, but no major losses, no major damage yet. Closeup of her eyes. We can see again the retouching is just sloppy, excessive, heavy-handed, and it destroys any delicacy and nuance, any sensitivity that was in her eyes before. And that's really problematic because it changes who she is. And with one eye cleaned, we can see, my gosh, it is beautiful. It is a very, very beautifully painted picture. So, I'm super excited to get rid of this overpaint and this hamfisted, sloppy, crude restoration attempt. To say I was elated with what I found after removing the overpaint is a gross understatement, and I am super excited to continue on with this painting so that I can see what she actually looks like when she's free of damage.
And the next step is some more structural work to stabilize and reinforce this tacking edge. It's frayed and it's starting to come apart and I don't trust that it will support the painting when it gets put back on this support. So, I'm going to strip line it. Instead of lining the entire canvas, which frankly I'm surprised wasn't done during the last conservation attempt, I'm just going to be adding canvas to this edge so that we have more meat or material when I go to stretch it. After applying an adhesive film with my iron, I'll peel off the release layer, which allows me to iron it on. And I'll start laying out my small pieces of canvas. Now, instead of using one big piece of canvas and cutting an oval out, I'm going to be using lots of little pieces. And the reason for this is the warp and the weft of the canvas. That is the grain of the canvas. If I were to cut out an oval on the warp and the weft, it would be rigid and the canvas wouldn't stretch. But on the diagonal, it would stretch a lot and that wouldn't provide adequate support for this painting when I go to stretch it. Not to mention, it could also distort this canvas. So, lots of little pieces with the grain all oriented towards the center of the painting will allow me to pull on them evenly without creating distortions. Now, I'm going to use a ruler and some chalk here to mark out the cut lines according to the middle of the canvas. And I want these all to be even because it's going to make it not only neat and tidy, but it's also going to yield a stronger result. So, once I've figured out those cut lines, I will cut through both pieces of canvas. You can see I'm removing two pieces right there. I'll do it again here. You can see the top layer and the bottom layer getting cut through. and I'll remove the excess. And what that does is create a nice even aligned joint. So, I'm going to go through all of these little pieces of canvas and cut them. I generally don't need the chalk lines, but it helps illustrate the point, so I figured why not do it. I've done this enough that I can do it freehand. And you can see right there how the two pieces of canvas align really nicely. That's precisely what I wanted. So, using my iron and applying some more heat, I will bond the canvas down to the original by melting this adhesive film. And then I'll transfer some weight onto it and let it dry. It's slower going to do an oval painting than it is to do a rectilinear painting, but it's not terribly difficult once you've figured it out. And this has taken me a long time to get this fast at it and this proficient. The first time I did it, it took me nearly a whole day. Now, it only takes 20 or 30 minutes.
Before I can return the painting to its support, I have to put the support back together. It's all glued up and all stable. And now I just need to put this puzzle together so that I have a solid support. Once I have put it together, I'm going to drive some nails into the corners so that it doesn't deform as I handle it and tack it. This support isn't terribly strong as it is. So without these nails, it will definitely come apart. Once secured and I guess squared up, even though it's not a square, I will transfer the painting and start aligning it. Now, unlike a square where I have four corners here, I have to go around it a couple of times to make sure everything is in its right orientation. And once I get that, I'll lay out some keys and I'll begin the stretching process. And this always starts by driving one or two tacks in the center of each side. Now, since I don't have sides, I'll use the top and bottom and left and right and drive them into the center of the pieces of wood. This allows me to create a taut center of the painting. And then I can work around the painting, tightening up the rest of it. Again, it's not terribly complicated once you've done it. Oh, 30, 50, 100, 200 times. First time it's really confusing, but it does get easier. Now, stretching an oval painting is a lot like trueing up or tuning a bicycle wheel or tightening the lug nuts on your car. You don't want to go clockwise or counterclockwise because you'll create uneven tension. So, what I'm doing is I'm going one way. In this case, I'm starting and moving to the right. Then, I will flip it and then I will move to the left. And what I want to do is work kind of across like a star shape. Work on one side, then flip it, work on the other, then flip it, work on the other, so on and so forth. And I'm trying to make sure that I'm always pulling across the area that I just tacked so that there isn't canvas distortion. And once I finished with that, that was the easy part. Now comes the hard part. But it's also the fun part, the tidying up of the back. Here it's a little bit more complicated than a rectilinear painting because I have to deal with all of these little pieces and the curvature. I usually start in the middle of the long side and then cascade out towards the middle of the short side. And I don't know if I can explain it any better way than just to see how I do it. And again, this is one of those parts that I really like to take my time and make sure it's done well because it telegraphs ultimate care going into this piece. And you can see just how nice it looks. Now, the original keys were inadequate, so I cut some new ones and I rounded the edges because that's often common with oval stretchers. And it also looks really nice. And I'll drive these keys in. And these will allow the support to expand. Remember, there's no glue in these joints. They're free floating double finger miter joints. Once they're all in place, I'll use some tacks and some fishing line to secure these keys so that they don't get lost and end up in between the canvas and the stretcher bar, which could create a dent or bulge and that could jeopardize the stability of the paint film. Not to mention, the key would be lost and well, we'd have to cut a new one, which is totally unnecessary if we can make sure they don't get lost in the first place.
[Applause] So, it's only four sets of keys. So, only four sets of string and tacks. And it goes relatively quickly. And once I've completed that, then I can take the painting and start filling it in. There weren't a lot of losses on this painting. I was pretty surprised. I thought that there was going to be a lot of damage and a lot of missing paint given the surface texture and how much overpaint there was, but I am pleasantly surprised that the filling in is relatively minor and it's mostly along the edges. And so it's relatively easy here. Once the fill-in has been applied, but before it dries completely, I'll come back and start removing it. Removing it while it's still a little bit wet while it's drying makes the removal process a little bit easier. And I can use my fingers and hands almost as like a sandpaper to remove the bulk of the material and then come back with the swab and remove just the excess haze. And I want to keep the fill-in limited to just the areas of paint loss, nowhere else.
Once the fill-in has dried, I can then take the painting back to the varnishing room where I'm going to apply an isolation or saturation layer. And this painting is a great illustration of why this step is critically necessary. You see, we've seen her shirt and it looks black and kind of drab and washed out. But when I apply this synthetic resin, it's going to change radically. It's not black at all. It's green. And if I didn't apply this varnish, I might be tempted to retouch it black. And then when I apply the final varnish, well, my black retouching wouldn't match the green of her shirt. So that's why this layer is critically important. I'm going to start my retouching on her collar, which I know sounds a little odd because it's a really consequential part of the painting, and frankly, it's a really difficult part. Normally, I'll start somewhere benign or in the background where I can notch an easy victory. You've heard me talk about that a lot. But here today, I'm really excited and I feel really good about my retouching. So, I want to jump right into what I think is going to be one of the more challenging aspects. Now, luckily, I have the right side of her collar to use as a reference. And there are some bits and pieces of the original pattern remaining, but this is an area where I'm having to almost recreate what was there before. Now, I don't love doing this. No conservator loves having to recreate something that was lost. But in this case, we can't just leave it as is. It's tremendously distracting, and there is no other alternative. So using lots of little dots of color and trying to approximate what was there before, I think we can get a good version or something at least that blends in, that doesn't seem too out of place, that doesn't catch our eye, that just kind of feels natural. And that's really what the retouching process is about. Trying to make the painting seem whole so that we don't notice the damage so that it doesn't catch our eye and take us away from the overall image and magic that the artist created. And again, it gives me great pleasure to not make this stone purple and green.
Now, on her clothing, where previously the entire area was overpainted black, I'm going to take a much different approach and just retouch the cracks. Yes, it takes a lot more time and it's more difficult, but it's the right way to do this work. Same thing goes for the background. I suspect that the whole background was overpainted because of this myriad of spiderweb cracking, but there's a better way than just overpaint. It's called retouching, and that's what I'm doing here. Moving on to her hair. Same thing. Delicate, deliberate retouching with a fine brush, color matching, and just making the damage go away while still keeping all of the integrity of the original. This is why people go to professional conservators because we have the experience, we have the knowhow, and we understand the ethics of the work we're doing. Yes, it's tempting to DIY everything, but that's how you end up with a painting that's grossly overpainted and comically awful. Doing it the right way may be more difficult, may be more time-consuming, and it may be more frustrating, but it's the right way to do it. Particularly when dealing with somebody else's deliberate expression of artistic endeavor. This is not something that we get to take liberties in. I can't simply paint her hair black because I like the way it looks. I have to work from what I'm given, and I have to respect the artist's original.
Onto her neck. And it's a little bit more complicated. The losses are much larger, so I have to be a little bit more liberal with the retouching, but still I'm trying not to overpaint any of the original. Yes, it's inevitable that some of the original does get overpainted because the losses here are abrasions. They're not deliberate losses with beginnings and ends or crisp edges. They're kind of faded and feathered. So, it's harder to limit the retouching. But again, instead of using a really fat brush and just overpainting everything, I'm using a very tiny brush and lots of little dots of color to try to approximate what was there before. Now, up close, it's probably pretty easy to see all of this retouching. But keep in mind, I'm filming this from about 3 feet away from the surface. And if you're looking at a painting from 3 feet away, well, you're not seeing the painting. You're seeing the trees and not the forest. And while that may be beneficial in some aspects, that's not what the artist wanted you to see. They want you to see the entire piece, the sum of the parts. So take a few steps back and as you do, the retouching will disappear. Your eye will no longer catch it and your brain will gloss over it and assemble the image as a whole. And that's what we're trying to do here. So again, just working slowly across all of these cracks, filling them in, going back, changing the color a little bit, making sure that as I lean back in my chair, the retouching disappears. And anything that catches my eye will be a candidate for retouching or re-retouching. If I don't like the way it looks and it seems distracting, I'll come back and I'll retouch it again.
Now, generally working with skin tones is fairly easy because there's a high concentration of white, at least with Caucasian skin tones, and that makes the paint very stable. It makes it very opaque. But that doesn't mean that this is easy. All of these colors were mixed on the canvas by the artist wet on wet, which gives a really beautiful soft effect. There's a lot of blending and a lot of smooth transitions of color, but that's really, really hard to retouch. And one of the reasons is because the paint that we use dries really quickly and it isn't really able to be blended. You can try, but what you end up doing is just lifting off the previous layer of paint and smearing it all around. And that's why we use lots and little dots of color. It's much like the halftone image on a newspaper or a magazine. When you look at it, you see a color, but if you look at it under magnification, what you'll find is lots of little dots assembled together that from a distance create one color. And that's one of the ways that we do retouching. Of course, we try to match the color on the first go-round, but if we need to change it a little bit, make it warmer, make it cooler, we generally don't cover all of what we've laid down. We just try to break it up. And that's a pretty successful approach. And as you can see here, her face is starting to come together, but it is slow-going. Surprisingly, retouching lots of tiny little cracks takes a lot of time. It's really difficult. And part of the reason is because I'm trying to be as conservative as possible and to limit the retouching to just these little cracks. I want to preserve as much of the original as possible and not encroach on the artist's work. But that takes a lot of time. Not to mention, matching these colors, like I mentioned, is really, really tricky. Sometimes I think I've got it, I turn to look at my palette, and then I can see the retouching I just put down has changed as it's dried, and it no longer looks right. So, I have to come back and do it again. But this is all part of the retouching process. I'm not mad at it, and I relish the challenge to perfect my trade any which way I can. So, I will keep on chugging on and keep working to put her back together.
As I turn my attention to her forehead, another area that was grossly overpainted because it was easier, I guess, I'm going to work through this spiderweb of cracks, trying to eliminate them, at least visually. Many of the treatments that I did before mitigated the textural appearance so that the cracks won't catch as much light. They are still there, but these dark lines really break up the image. And so this type of retouching is critically necessary. Sometimes we leave the cracks on paintings because there are too many to retouch or because they're just not that important. But on a painting like this where they're really really focused on the face, we want to get rid of as many as possible because they just destroy the illusion that the artist was creating and we end up focusing just on those cracks. And coming to the eyes, it's almost unimaginable that somebody with little experience and a big fat brush filled with color thought that smearing it over these cracks would yield something acceptable, something with any nuance, any delicacy, any emotion. And as I work to remove these cracks and restore this painting, we can see the softness come back in her expression. And finally, we're able to see her or maybe she's able to see us.
The final step in the conservation of this painting is the application of the final varnish, a synthetic resin layer applied on top of the painting. While earlier we applied the first layer of synthetic resin to assist in the retouching, this layer will change the sheen, even it out, make it shinier or glossier depending on how I mix the varnish, and also protect everything from ultraviolet light, and from fingerprints, dust, dirt, oils, and well, life. Once the varnish is applied to the surface and distributed, I can continue brushing it out as the solvent evaporates. This allows me to add a very fine texture to the resin as it dries, which helps scatter the reflecting light and makes it not super glossy, but not super matte. A really beautiful balance in between.
With every disaster that arrives at the studio, there's one thing that will carry me through the emotional upheaval, the disappointment, and the difficult work that will follow. And that's the knowledge that if I do everything right, if I focus, and I work hard, that this painting can be saved. And talk about saved. What a transformation. When it arrived at the studio, it was a caricature, heavily handled and poorly treated. Just about every surface of this painting was covered in new oil paint in a crude attempt to make it better, to repair small, relatively inconsequential issues. And this damage destroyed the nuance and the subtlety. It worked against the artist. And speaking of which, we found the signature hidden underneath all of that overpaint. We now know the artist as N. Marshall from 1863. All of the areas of loss, the lace on her collar, fully recreated and restored. And herself, her beautiful skin tone is now even and smooth, not pancake makeup. And her expression can be seen. The delicacy with which she was painted, the skill of the artist and her are now revealed. Embarking upon this project, I knew that something better laid beneath what we saw when the painting arrived at the studio. But I had no idea it was this good. And that is a tremendous reward not only for me but for the client who took a risk on this painting hoping that there would be something better than what was. And through a lot of work both structural and cosmetic, repairing the broken support, removing all of the overpaint, stabilizing the paint layer and the canvas. This painting has really come together. Or I should maybe say that the painting has returned to itself, free of all the damage and heavy-handed work that plagued it. When the painting arrived, it was a disaster, completely covered in overpaint, sloppy, poorly executed. It had rendered a once beautiful painting as a cartoon, a caricature of itself. And looking at the painting under UV, it's actually difficult to find any part of the painting that's not overpainted. But with the painting free of all of that crude work, all of that heavy-handed overpainting, we can see the beauty, the delicacy, and the nuance that was lost. And looking at my work under UV, yes, it's extensive. There was a lot of retouching, but the difference is radical. Mine is restrained and applied only where needed. And while this painting may have been a fail when it arrived at the studio, as we send it home to the owner, I think we can all call this a radical success.