Small or Partial Treatments
The Brooklyn lab is an active, busy, and collaborative space. This page will house small snippets of treatment from my own projects that I want to highlight as well as treatment that I partially assisted with - gaining valuable skills not always demonstrated in other project described on this website.
Keying Out
Lauren Bradley was treating Dorothy by Kyohei Inukai. The painting had some draws and canvas ripples along the proper right edge. Lauren wanted to key it out to address the planar deformations. I asked to help as I hadn’t keyed out a painting before and wanted to learn, Lauren was happy to oblige. I also helped secure the keys with waxed string stapled to the stretcher to ensure they would not become dissociated or fall between canvas and stretcher bars.
Dorothy by Kyohei Inukai, 1933
Keying out the stretcher
PC: Camille Ferrer
Secured keys on Dorothy’s stretcher
Localized Varnish Re-saturation
This Eakins came to the lab to have some previously treated scuffs re-saturated. On closer inspection I noted some odd speckles along the center of the proper left edge that almost looked like a spray pattern. I looked at these specks under magnification to better understand them. Rather than accretions on the surface, these specks were small instances of the varnish delamination. The cause of these specs is unknown. I used a small brush and D38 to observe if capilary action could be used to fill the air space between the varnish and paint layer, and it worked. I selectively fed small amounts of Regalrez 1094 in Shellsol 71 to the specks of delamination using a brush. I waited a full day after my initial application to assess how well the varnish had saturated. Some areas needed more varnish, and after a second application of Regalrez I was generally satisfied with the results. I applied the same Regalrez to the scuffs to saturate them
William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River by Thomas Eakins, 1908
Speckles before (left) and after (right) selective varnish application
Scuff before (left) and after (right) selective varnish application
Group Varnishing
Lauren Bradley had been working on The Sculptor by John Koch. It’s a rather large painting and needed a re-saturating varnish. This required the full paintings lab (Lauren Bradley, Ellen Nigro, Camille Ferrer, and myself) to actively participate in the varnishing. This was a Regalrez varnish brush applied to the surface.
The Sculptor by John Koch, 1964
Entire paintings lab brush varnishing The Sculptor, PC: Taka Umezawa