 Hey, thank you again for joining us for today's webinar. This is of course the third in this eight-part series to complement your in-person training for the Miami Heritage Response Team. These programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, we will continue the discussion of some material specific salvage tips. We were fortunate last week to be joined by Randy Silverman to discuss book and paper materials. Today, we will hear from Susan Blakeney about paintings and next week we'll learn about photographs on electronic media from Andrew Robb. All of these presenters are conservators who also serve as team members from the National Heritage Responders. So we're fortunate to have their expert knowledge captured in these programs. Again, a reminder that if you have missed any live programs, please make sure that you watch a recording of the Miss Session. You should have completed watching all eight programs by Monday, October 16th, which is the first date of our final in-person training. Before we begin the presentation, just a quick refresher of technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes included one label chat on the left-hand side. Use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, share information, or links. Links will be live. So if you share a URL, all attendees can click directly on it. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. I will collect those questions and verbally ask them of Susan during a break in the presentation. You may have noticed a new box labeled files at the bottom of your screen. This is similar to the web links box that we used before. To use this feature, just simply click on the name of a file to highlight it in blue. Then click the download file button to save a copy of the PDF to your computer. Susan has been very generous in providing some resources that will help supplement the material she is reviewing today. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's speaker, Susan Blakeney. Susan is a paintings conservator, distinguished as a fellow in both the AIC and the IIC. She received a bachelor's degree in studio art from the University of Kentucky in 1969 and completed a six-year apprenticeship in London, concentrating a 17th century old masters. Susan returned to America in 1975, establishing a private practice in New York. In 1981, she incorporated her business as Westlake Conservators LTD. Susan served as a director of the American Institute for Conservation's Conservators in Private Practice Group for three terms. And is the vice president of the Central New York Conservation Guild. In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Susan was a volunteer with the American Association for State and Local Histories efforts to survey cultural damage along the Mississippi coast. She is among a group of trained national heritage responders and with that group, she deployed in 2008 to survey damage in Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike. And then again in 2010, to Haiti to assess cultural damage after their earthquake. Susan additionally has a passion for connecting to collections and has a long career of public outreach and education. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to Susan for her presentation on painting salvage. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm glad that I'm finally back and I hope everybody can hear me much better. I want to thank you for tuning in to learn more about how to rescue paintings. I've been involved with all scales and types of disasters since opening my private practice in 1975. The successful recovery of paintings after a disaster is dependent upon fast response, knowledge of their vulnerability, safe handling procedures, a basic understanding of emergency procedures for a range of situations and knowledge of what damage professional conservation treatments might be able to correct. I plan to show you visual images of damage to paintings that may be prevented and are conserved to a condition to exhibit again. Now, most events are uncontrollable and there are things that you can do in advance, maybe to minimize the damage. But to familiarize with you with understanding what you see, you've got to make decisions when you're salvaging paintings after all kinds of disasters. You all have a varied background and represent many collection types. So training how to handle paintings and minimize damage following a disaster plan will be the foundation of your activities. From the experience, I know that you will be using all your skills and you'll still need advice from a specialist painting conservator. Every disaster is different and you're going to have to jump to solving them and problem solving in any way you can. Consultation with a specialist is always going to be necessary. Now, in order to understand how to rescue a painting, you really need to be able to understand what they're made of. And a painting has many different layers that as a conservator we worry about each one of these layers and we often talk about them when we're doing an exam. So the very top layer would be the varnish which protects the paint layer and then the ground is actually something that can be water soluble or not and it creates a smooth surface to paint upon. The most common support or support is a canvas and it's usually helped taught by a stretcher. Now if a painting is framed, it actually has even more layers because the frame itself will surround the painting. If it's glazed, the glazing will be bumped up with little strips called spacers hopefully so the glass is not touching the surface and then you still are left with all of the paint layers, the support canvas, auxiliary support and then finally a backing board is usually put on most paintings in museum collections and backing boards can be solid, they can be clear, they could be a variety of different materials. And during a disaster you're often going to need to unframe the painting to help speed the drying. So sometimes a painting has been treated and if it's been treated the older the painting is the more likely that it might have been through a process called lining and lining actually adds another layer of fabric to the original canvas which is above it and often the original canvas as it becomes aged gets torn, it becomes embrittled, it can't support the paint layer and the ground again so the lining is what will do that. But the linings are done with many different kinds of adhesives and each one of these adhesives presents a different problem in a disaster. So paintings can be on a rigid or on a flexible support. Normally the more flexing a support gives the more unstable the paint will be and here we see different examples of of paint layers. In this very top piece it's a solid support which is rigid and oil paint as it ages becomes more and more rigid almost like an egg shell. The next layer is on a flexible support it's canvas and when the canvas begins to move cracks occur and as the cracks occur the older the painting the more and more cracks it will get due to motion of the support. Now as it even ages further these cracks will begin to loosen on the edges and we get what's called cupping and the cupping is now open and if we were to look at this painting through transmitted light we can see how open the cracks are. The bottom is an example of a collage and in a collage it could be on a solid support but it could be mixed materials and we could run into paper we could have paint we could have fabrics all different kinds of paint mediums. So paint binding mediums vary so all paint when it's made is made from either a dye or pigments and these are all held in a medium and the mediums are if there are so many different types but one of the earliest mediums is encaustic wax and that's the early egyptian faeum portraits were made with wax and they're still in good condition today and oil paint becomes very brittle as it ages new oil paintings are really really flexible and very susceptible to all kinds of solvents and the actual drawing of the oil paint doesn't really completely finish for about 75 years. What painting done in gouache is water soluble which means during a water event this would be one of your more sensitive types. Same thing with distempera is more like poster paint literally there's hardly any binding medium in it and often theater curtains are painted in distempera. So acrylic is one of our newer paints in most 20th century paintings you might consider could be an acrylic if they're not done in oil but if the label on the back says oil don't necessarily believe it you we never really trust you're going to have to test to find out what is the medium sensitive to and a pastel we all know is extremely friable you want to keep your fingers off of it and usually these are under glass so the solubility stability and friability are going to be different by what kind of paint it is how many layers there are and how old it is this top picture is going to show what we call a fat paint film which means the medium is excessive and it certainly surrounds all of the particles encapsulating it below we have a lean paint film on top of a fat paint film the lean film literally has less medium and the pigment is exposed on the surface it might be friable it might want to come off in your hands touching it and if this painting were on a ground that's water soluble it would actually absorb some of the meeting and medium and make the paint friable so what are paintings vulnerable to so many different things so that when you're handling them you want to be aware of all of these things the relative humidity probably is the thing that expands and contracts the materials the most causing all the cracks causing insecurities causing flaking water drips and spills also cause stains they make dirt migrate they actually make paint flake they might attack aligning adhesive a lot of problems so water is the enemy of paintings staining we know if a painting is in a flood it can get stained even if a painting gets wet in its frame and the water collects along the bottom edge it might hit dirt and that dirt might be wicked up into the painting with the water scratches are also a big problem and abrasion so that when you're packing and handling you want to use the right materials in between the surfaces and you want to be careful that even your own clothing doesn't scratch a paint surface as you're carrying it from one room to the other local pressure is a problem paintings are very sensitive think about it don't ever push on the front or the back of a painting on canvas don't ever lean it onto something that will cause a bump or a dimple or a dent and impact punctures and tears are caused by vibration they could even be caused by being caught in the wind if you were if you're carrying a very large painting on a windy day from a building to a truck and you had two people the wind could actually catch it like a sail and pop the canvas and make it crack so heat is also something that can be the enemy or it can help painting so that when we treat a painting and the paint layer is brittle when we soften it with controlled heat we could actually move that paint around but it but in a dangerous situation it can blister and it can scorch the paint and temperature extremes are something that really affect acrylic paintings if you try to move an acrylic painting in the winter you need to be very careful because you might crack it just by sheer vibration or shock so between 41 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit paintings acrylic paintings actually are brittle they're not as flexible as you would think insects and mold mold grows on all surfaces given the right environment so anytime you reach 70 percent relative humidity you're going to possibly have a wild mold upgrade you want to try to keep your humidity below that if possible and most museums would would really like to keep their environment for paintings typically around 55 percent would paint paintings on panel are also very susceptible because wood absorbs and desorbs moisture with the content of the air and improper materials for storage and exhibit exhibition are a problem so you need to learn which materials will be safest to use when you're storing short term and long term or even wrapping so in preparing for your event whatever it's a small or a big one you can think about the considerations of which ones are prioritized and which ones are the most sensitive and you might want to prioritize them by the market value by their historic value by their sentimental value you might have props and decor that have very little value and during an event nobody will know if it's a collectible or not you might want to prioritize them by the importance to your collection by the sensitivity of the paint to what kind of environment and by the location so paintings that are unlined are more sensitive than lined paintings as a rule of thumb paintings that are unvarnished are more sensitive to varnish paintings because that unvarnished surface can be easily stained whereas a varnish layer takes whatever the material is and the varnish can be removed hopefully with that material so it protects it wood and paper can also be considered very sensitive because they respond dramatically to relative humidity changes you're going to see paper begin to cockle and mold will begin to grow wood will shrink and you will get what we call compression shrinkage of cells which is not reversible it cannot come back pastels are very sensitive and should be under glazing of any of all kinds and water soluble grounds are obviously more sensitive to moisture than others and again back to acrylics acrylic paintings are very sensitive to temperature changes to cold temperatures and certainly to most organic solvents except for mineral spirits so during an event you might not be able to recognize the portrait or whatever you're looking at and in this situation someone took their hand on the left and rub the debris back and forth to find out what the painting was but before that happens you really need to study the surface with what we call raking light and a raking light can be from a flashlight and if you hold the flashlight on one edge of the painting and shine it directly across the surface not at it you're going to see if paint is lifted and insecure it's how we examine paintings all the time we go we look at it from this direction we look at it in this direction and we look at it in this direction with flashlights or a raking light of some type because with normal light you're not going to see that lifted paint so cracks cracks occur in paint layers when the paint layer starts to move and most oil paintings on canvas from the 19th century have begun to crack in what we call classic patterns the cracks begin in the corners and they you because of of the they usually follow the corners with a circular pattern like this and it will do the same thing in this corner and the same thing in this corner all the corners will act the same then the cracks begin to go through the middle down to here on the painting on the right we've also got circular cracks here that circular crack is from a blow so anytime something bumps or hits a painting it will it will develop cracks now what it happens you might go oh thank goodness it wasn't hard enough to crack it but you probably have developed micro cracks which you're not going to see until the painting continues to age so varnish blooms in high humidity high humidity caused this bloom underneath the corners of this portrait on the left because of us what's called a spandrel in the frame which made it look like an oval painting even though it was a rectangular painting in that frame so when the when the varnish blooms if it's cleaned off the painting will return to good condition on the left those little spots dark spots are probably where something hit the painting and it took the bloom away ever so slightly so this is the companion portrait and also again you can see that once the varnish is removed and it's re-varnished on the right the painting remains in good condition and a bloomed varnish can occur in an entire collection during a construction event i've seen this happen in a museum where they had tried to cordon off a gallery filled with paintings with all kinds of plastic and tape and yet fine particulate construction dust still got in and put a dust layer on all the paintings that dust layer was a nucleus for the moisture to be drawn to in the entire collection turned whitish on bloom now the odd thing was that anywhere the paintings had actually been handled with fingers fingerprints appeared too because the grease of people's hands handling these paintings prevented that dust from settling there very curious thing so a home disaster in this incident created a major mold outbreak in the northeast so depending where we're in the northeast and i have to deal with freezing conditions and when heat goes off when the owners aren't home or an event happens like moisture in a flood because of a burst radiator pipe the mold will start to grow everywhere because it's got all the right conditions and the mold like this is extremely dangerous and needs to be removed when you're wearing a hazmat suit so fire will actually bloom an entire varnish on a surface of a painting by putting the water out i mean the high moisture of putting a fire out is incredible and this particular fire damage painting on the left the varnish was so bloomed and it had money layers of varnish that you could barely see into it there's a cleaning test right here in the middle you can still see that the varnish will come off and over here you can still see another test here because we've only taken one layer of the varnish off but this painting really was savable now this new orlean's Katrina victim developed mold and a bloom and on the on the right hand picture here is a tide line that shows how high the water went during the flood and where the painting was submerged over here there's a cleaning test right here this little dark spot which was a test to see how bloomed the varnish was and if we could safely remove it and we could since Katrina i have been a pen pal of an artist that i met who lost her entire portfolio in the upper corner is a picture of her house before the event and below is her house after the event which and which flooded her house three times her paintings that she lost she also exhibited the lower right corner here damaged after the event in her home and she also made a book her name is Donna Simmons and she actually has created a book that you could buy online that show her damaged paintings which tell a story and she's continued to exhibit damaged paintings telling the story of Katrina so high relative humidity also causes crystal growth this is a salt efflorescence from one of the paint bodies and this can be brushed off usually but it will regrow again given the right high humidity so something like this could be a problem and we often associate this with salt migration and paintings on concrete like murals in high humidity will often have crystal growths as well so cracking and cupping and flaking due to an unstable environment usually happens because the paint layer is brittle the supports in motion and it causes the beginning of cracks as it gets more and more severe this picture on the left is so extensive in cupping and cracking that the owners felt the collection felt that it could not be saved but it certainly can through the process called lining and heating the paint layer which will relax the cupping and we can return it to plane to a flat surface flaking from high humidity damage can occur in storage this portrait was stored in a new house in a basement on a relatively dry considerably dry new house and they had covered it with a sheet to hang there but when they opened it up after even a year they found that it had been flaking badly and that moisture had been coming through the walls and damaging this painting so a cellar is definitely not a wise place to store paintings so canvas can shrink in high humidity and when it does shrink if it's not restrained adequately it develops ripples and ripples might be these what we call draws all across the top layer here these long radiating ripples um happened because the artist put his tax in more than one inch apart and to prevent this you really want to have a tack about every inch if this were happening you might be able to add additional tax or staples to try to prevent this if you looked at your painting and found that the that the tax are three to six inches apart which they could be so canvas corner draws also happen when a stretcher condenses when a stretcher warps when a stretcher loses a key and stretchers are designed to expand by by having a key or two keys in every corner and if the corner is mitered that will expand evenly if it's an unmitred stretcher or what we might call a butt join it will expand unevenly and if you try to expand it you will create new draws that shouldn't be there because certain certain stretch stretchers should not be expanded and this these actually are brittle so the longer this has been there you can't just get these to pull out you have to actually use heat this can be very complex so deformations in the canvas happen when a canvas is loose and it's laying on its support in this situation this this long tall painting had a horizontal crossbar in the middle and this picture here on the right showing where the crossbar is the lead makes this cavity here start to start to sink in and the cavity on this end also sinks in to prevent that you need to block this up to the same level as as the stretcher so that it doesn't sink in and it remains flat so local water damage can instantly cause damage and some paintings are what we call shrinkers this particular painting had a water spill go across the surface and and collect down in this corner as it collected it created these corner draws when the canvas began to to stretch and expand and the paint erupted in intent cleavage on the long vertical drip some local water damage will stain the painting and this particular folk portrait had a water local water damage across the center with two spills you can see it on the back as well as it came through the canvas and this was a permanent stain it could not be cleaned off because there was something caustic in in the paint layer so to treat this that long stain had to be in painted to mask it now professional cleaning might prevent that stain if you can remove that drip right away this very contemporary painting also had a long drip right through the middle and this is a shaped canvas that i'm going to show you a little later on a very complex stretcher or strainer because it does not expand this particular drip was extremely caustic and i would always test this with saliva to see if i could possibly remove it i would take a q tip i would dampen it in my mouth and i would very carefully touch one little spot and see if would i rolled that q tip across it damp it would pick it up and whether it left a halo or a stain behind i would also be looking at the swab to see if any color came off or was it just the grime or the or whatever was the staining material it's not necessarily something you can do if you're not a conservator but on the other hand it's hard to say what you could do if you have a conservator with you for advice so back to what a shrinker is some canvases immediately almost and when a canvas shrinks it means that the multi filament fibers that are woven expand and contract and as they do that the print the brittle paint layer erupts into something we call tent cleavage they'll look like little a frames of paint in long lines and very tricky to treat but but they are treatable and in this instance the shrinker is in a in a bad situation but there are treatments i'm going to show you one in a little bit of how it could be treated so when a painting comes in with tenting you have to keep it face up any one of these tents could be completely just floating there and would want to fall so again this is what severe water damage caused it shrank the canvas we see corner draws and there is tenting now here's a close-up of the surface this is what we call tent cleavage each one of these ridges is really empty there's nothing in it it's just paint on each side and there are methods of putting what we call a protective facing on this in little pieces of paper so that we can face both sides of the ridge and yet down the road we're going to try to regain the lost dimension and lay that painting back down where it came from so this is the technique that we to actually regain that lost dimension it's a little bit like open heart surgery not quite but we go through many many steps to restretch this very this very fragile painting on the left we see what we call pull tabs that we've put on all the way around the edges of this painting these are secured with push pins into what we call a working stretcher or strainer so that this strainer now we're able to put this in we actually have the facing on the paper here holding all of the tents in place and we're going to put this into a humidity chamber and get the paint to relax so that we can expand this canvas in tiny tiny increments over a long a week long period probably so water damage also to a lining will sometimes disrupt the adhesive in this instance it was a water-based glue lining and on the left we see giant bulges this is called blind cleavage it's where the the actual lining has delaminated now so to correct this we actually need to put a facing on the entire painting and remove this lining that's why we really want to use reversible materials anytime we do a treatment to a painting it could need to be retreated the next day if it even had an accident on its way home we always have to use reversible materials now sometimes it's either too late this painting has lost it obviously it's a goner both the bottom of the frame has completely lost its its ornamentation the paint has no has no gesso left on the canvas and here on this very bottom edge the canvas is completely rotted through which indicates that this happened a long time ago and it's been like this for quite a while now canvas board is considered a solid support and it's a commercial support that many artists use but it's very susceptible to water and moist and high moisture and this painting is a great one to experiment with because it's a sentimental piece of a favorite tree painted by uncle George but look at the damage that has occurred to this support it's major now the treatment for this is a complete lining that canvas was removed from that failing support which is made of a pulp board and it was then mounted on a new support and here is a fabric and you'll see the reverse of the lined painting so this painting has truly been saved now the relative humidity swings also cause oil on panel insecurities this beautiful 17th century painting on panel was shipped from Texas to central new york and after residing in central new york for almost a week it developed these blisters and these blisters are now blind blisters and paint floating sort of on the surface of this requiring a very difficult treatment so anytime you see a painting on panel it's important that it's kept in the right environment in the winter in the northeast if we turn our heat on without environmental control we might have a humidity of 12 to 15 percent if we're lucky and that will will really cause a lot of damage to all of your wood objects furniture and anything it will shrink the wood and that will be irreversible shrinkage now this panel painting has what we call a full cradle on the back this is something that was added in europe to try to keep the panel from warping and the vertical bars are completely glued in place and yet the horizontal bars are like a puzzle they slide in and out they're meant to be free to allow motion of the support in america we usually remove these because they often cause more problems than they cure so here's an oil on panel that has also been in a frame that had a spandrel that blooms in the corners once we removed it and the paint has been falling on this coming off this panel along the grain of the wood the panel had a baton on the top and it used to have a baton but it's fallen off on the bottom which someone put on it to try to keep it flat battens don't work they actually cause more damage so here we can see on the left that there's light coming through behind that baton which means that the panel has still warped you can see the warp and on the right although dark these are fine paint losses with the grain of the wood and if we can stop this motion we can actually stop the flaking as well of the wood and that won't happen until we get it into a stable environment so the treatment for this was something called end grain balsa wood block support which on the right you see all over the back looks like it's a cheese board but it's not the grain from these little balsa wood blocks are running perpendicular to the painting it's designed to allow the paint the canvas or the panel to flex ever so slightly and if the panel really wants to really warp this panel this balsa wood backing is going to pop off before this panel splits in half it's a fail safe feature so here's an example of a 17th century panel that somebody stored in their basement how unfortunate that it caused all the loss on the right it was returned to good condition after a complete very lengthy treatment on the right so again do not store paintings in your basement so an oil on panel impact damage can be severe here we see the cradle has been damaged pieces are totally missing the frame on the bottom has literally lost parts of its ornamentation one bar is cracked entirely and the panel painting itself had damage in the corners as you can see and this this panel as I require correctly was in a severe accident a house had been vandalized and vandals had come in and tried to steal a lot of pieces and paintings and this is a painting that when they were running out the door they threw into a snow drift so when the when the policemen were looking for all the property they found this painting and in this event this pressure damage has happened however the painting was saved so here's another oil on panel and this particular painting split in two and the split was all along here and oftentimes panel paintings are composite structures they're made up of more than one plank which makes them susceptible to splitting so this russian icon has impact damage it could have happened as it fell from a wall the wood support is more than an inch thick very very thick and again it has cracks you know edge cracks which are here in two places which will lead this damage up into the painting if they're not corrected this was a very heavy interesting tooled and embossed paint layer which we were able to reproduce so that in a treatment it remains looking on damage now so paintings on canvas if you ever see a painting looking like this with this bulge all along the edge that's an indication that you have a detached margin the tacking margin along this edge is rotten and the canvas pulled off of the tack heads so that now we have this big bulge on the right and if left like this for any length of time paint loss will occur along that bulge now this happens sometimes in high humidity because the canvas is in brittle it's aged it's desiccated and as the canvas starts to get more and more attention in shrinking it will tear these margin edges so here is a brand new painting that was in a professor of arts exhibition at a college and it fell off the wall as it was being installed now this is a very very long painting it was probably maybe 10 12 feet long and it had been put on a folding stretcher to get out of the art studio and for him to travel with it more safely oil alkyd basically is one of our stronger paints layers our type of mediums and normally once it's dry it's you cannot even readissolve it with a solvent but in this case the shock of it hitting the floor instantly created these mechanical cracks and these are roughly at around the center of the center crossbar um and here's just a brief diagram of what a folding stretcher is and it means the canvas was folded around this rather large diameter um tube in the middle face in the painting is brand new when normally when this happens folding stretchers really lead to an early demise of paintings in my opinion it creates stress and eventually cracks along the fold line now paint layer surfaces are easily scratched this peaceable kingdom painting has a long scratch across the center which was done by a vandal however fortunately it was only in the in the in the varnish if it had been a harder scratch it would have gone down into the paint layer so varnishes actually will protect a painting from surface scratches so a major painting like problem painting like this don't throw it away it's hard to believe but this is savable it has it has all the problems we've seen plus a major tear and when we talk about tears we try to measure the length of the tear so that we understand how many inches we have to rejoin and when a tear occurs an emergency treatment if at all possible would be to tape it on the back with adhesive tape blue tape something that's removable for a temporary patch the longer this tear is left unjoined the wider the gap will permanently become because the canvas will begin to shrink also we have edge draws i think we have tinting from local water damage in this corner and i'm going to show you now some treatments that bring this painting back to good condition so when we're looking at a painting we use we use light for examination in different ways raking light i've already talked to you about which is in this instance shining the light across the surface to show these tents transmitted light on this side is shining a bright light through the painting from the back when you do this you can see open cracks of the tinting you can clearly see how long the tear is and you also see all the little paint losses so when i'm doing an exam and trying to see how fragile it is a transmitted light is really a big help so here's the same painting after a major treatment of lining tear repair and a burnt finger technique in the lower corner and also frame conservation but this painting was worth that treatment it's labor intensive but again now the painting has new life and it will be enjoyed for years to come so high heat is a problem in fires and locally so heat blisters oil paint and blisters happen before it begins to char if it chars that's permanent damage this cleaning test on the right shows that we can remove the soot and varnish but we're left still with the blistered paint here's an example of a painting on panel that a lamp fell onto overnight and the light bulb resting on the surface caused these blisters if it had been much longer i think it eventually might have started the wood on fire so a studio fire in an artist's home resulted in major smoke this was a huge problem because the artist's entire portfolio was there and she had three months to send it to europe for a major retrospective show all of these paintings were in acrylic acrylic paintings are the most vulnerable to soot they're a soft paint layered they would literally become stained with soot possibly they're also usually not varnished because most varnishes if unless they're soluble in mineral spirits cannot be removed from acrylic paintings without also dissolving the paint the way we remove varnishes is to dissolve them with organic solvents now acrylic paintings literally are dissolved in all organic solvents except for certain mineral spirits fortunately this artist um had her name is kathy calderwood she had actually put a spray varnish for acrylic paintings on all of her paintings when she finished them this spray varnish allowed us to dissolve it with varsal which is one of the forms of mineral spirits that does not have very many polar solvents in it and we could remove this soot laden varnish safely and and save her painting collection this particular painting in the middle had long drips in the soot as well you can see running across the surface on the right you can see that when she removes these paintings from the wall she'll have a complete silhouette that's relatively clean that's how heavy the soot was soot really infiltrated the bulk of her home and she had to live out of this house for two months was very traumatic for her here's another fire this was in a historic shaker house that had an incredible collection of antique items and drawings and photographs very few paintings but because it was dead winter we're confronted with icicles on the stairwell everything is covered with ice in the attic because of all the volume of water used to put this fire out here are some of the pieces that were rescued by the owners into a room as they quickly vacated but look at what happens with this piece this was a photograph of one of their famous horses and the water that the frame you know trapped is now wicking directly towards the photograph and and literally by osmosis going up into the paper support here on the right is on the left is one that we've unframed and it's beginning to cockle and separate on its own and we have it drying on blotter paper with weights on all four corners and up here you'll see lots of table space is needed for any disaster recovery to dry things out here we have a humidity chamber something in controlled drying not everything should dry really fast wood needs to be controlled and should dry more slowly so wax lined paintings on canvas for years and years the first early linings were done with wax after glue and wax is extremely susceptible to heat this particular painting was warped badly in a car left while somebody went shopping for over an hour and the temperature reached well over 110 degrees the surface is warped it's no longer flat but it can be treated by revacuum heat settings so it's only temporarily damaged so choosing the wrong paper when you're wrapping something will end up with it getting stuck to the surface possibly now sometimes we want paper to stick and that's called a facing and we actually adhere it with adhesives this is paper that was not meant to stick and it was a tissue paper which in high heat during shipping literally softened the varnish it became permanently attached to it to treat this we had to remove the varnish which is a more lengthy process now when you're wrapping a painting that could be damp always leave an opening for condensation to come out try to wrap it with something that might be allow it to continue to dry if you're feeling at all that it might not be dry usually with paintings you can do a temperature test with your hands paintings that are feel cool definitely still have trapped moisture in them i mean it's not i mean it's not completely infallible but it's a start it takes a long time to completely dry things out so basic handling tips number one handle paintings as briefly and as infrequently as possible plan to move by clearing a path and preparing or receiving your before beginning the move otherwise you're going to have to set something down and you won't have a place to do it safely when you're gripping the painting try not to squeeze it keep your fingers off the paint think of it as being wet paint you don't want to touch anything to the surface and set it down gently preferably on a cushion think of it as a glass of water and set it down without sloshing very carefully vibration and shock causes shrink it i mean causes cracks tips two examine the painting for flaking paint and if stable look at the back so when you're going to be examining for flaking you're going to use your flashlight break light across the surface from the left from right from the top from the bottom you're going to see is this paint insecure determine the security of the framing don't ever trust your framing to be secure when you turn it over you may find two little finishing nails barely holding it in place so until you know think of it as it could fall out of the frame when you're moving small frame paintings carry face in and support the bottom in the side you want to support the frame by the structural edges if possible don't carry the frames from the top bar alone because they might pull right apart some frames if they're constructed inadequately i'll say the miters will completely fall apart if the painting is having you grab it by the top bar this happens a lot with paintings under glass and under glazing you often pop that that frame so don't ever carry it from a hanging wire the wire might break it might be attached with screw eyes that are going to pull out don't trust it use your hands structurally on the sides and the bottom mid to oversized paintings carry with two handlers or use a dolly and you keep your eyes on the paint layer two people are really good to handle both sides of the painting once it becomes large if the frame is guilt set it on padded blocks or you're going to lose ornaments protruding ornaments might be lost some frames are what we call swept they have curled perimeters they have protrusions that stick out if you tip a frame forward it puts all the weight and pressure on these protrusions you can only tip it backwards literally a little bit without putting pressure on these so padded blocks are something i'm going to show you a little later it's what we use for laying a painting face down or standing up so collect and preserve any detached fragments for treatment if the frame's falling apart bag every little piece in a ziploc bag and if you have if you can tape it to the hanging wire somewhere keep it somewhere where you have it or label it and save it set it aside because every piece that's lost we have to recreate if we have the pieces we can reattach tips for carry and lay face up if actively flaking but support the canvas cavity from behind now i already showed you a picture of a big painting laying on its back where the canvas sank into the cavities so if you're going to lay a painting face up on its back think about what could you block up the reverse so that the canvas is flush with the with the surface the high edge of the stretcher to prevent it from causing deformations again avoid local pressure from the front and the back when you're leaning a painting into something anytime you lean another painting into the canvas of another larger painting you're going to cause a dent that dent could become permanent and it may cause paint loss don't ever let anything push on the front or the back think of a think of your painting as an eggshell very brittle easy to break backing boards are really important preventive measures and most museums carry put a backing board on all of their paintings depending upon the where you are environmentally you might want your backing board to be clear and not not light hiding because sometimes darkness of a backing board will lead to mold growth and these are things that are judgment calls by collection managers and conservators for each collection but if it has a backing board on it it might protect it from water spells it certainly protects it from debris falling behind it and many other things here's an example of an unnecessary basketball sized dent in this over the couch size painting big circular dent in the middle I can only guess was caused by leaning this painting up on under the arm of a couch or an opposed chair for a few days or so and that dent now is very difficult to remove and made it into a quite a treatment to get rid of this here is a painting on mesomite which developed a huge warp from being having something heavy sat on top of it while it was between two objects and this became almost a quonset hut and it took a very difficult treatment but on the right it was saved and returned to a flat plane unsupported canvases deform and here we have different examples of a couple of small oval paintings which haven't been on a stretcher and in years and years and another one on the right that was left unsupported and if you leave a canvas like this for any length of time it will begin to shrink with humidity develop cock holes and begin to warp the picture on the left this one don't ever try to open this up yourself you it requires a conservator to gently heat this to relax it and order or humidify in order to remove that open it up to see what you even have rolling a painting is something that people want to do to protect it or to move it or to travel with it and rolling a painting face in is something you should never ever do it's the wrong direction to roll a painting when you roll a painting face in it develops something called washboard deformations and these deformations are long cracks long ridges and often leads to paint loss and definitely leads to a major treatment to correct so to roll a painting you want to roll it face in when you roll it face in it actually expands any cracks and so the cracks don't push on each other here's an example of rolling a Morris Lewis very large contemporary painting on a very large roll and you'll see that on the right the roll is supported by boards on each side so there's no pressure on the paint layer as this painting is rolled onto it and the tube might be called a Sano tube can be protected with polyethylene first to make it more archival depending upon how long you want to store your painting on it so there's so many different stretcher types on the top here is that folding stretcher I showed you earlier that fell off the wall with from the oil alkyd painting and on the bottom is a shaped stretcher or strainer because it does not expand and this is I showed you this painting earlier by Russell Hinman that had a long caustic drip across the surface so checking for insecure framing as you quickly look at the back and you're going to see that nothing but finishing nails are holding this piece in place here the nails driven right through the stretcher into the frame very bad practice it will damage both the frame and the stretcher even extracting the nails causes damage so this backing here is a backing board that has corners cut out I'm sorry for the noise of my phone but I can't turn it out and this backing board is made of Coroplast and it's waterproof so in this instance it may have helped the painting avoid some of the dampness it also will save the painting during a humidity spike and that's one of the most important reasons that we put it on if you have short-term humidity fluctuations this buys time it will make the canvas react much more slowly so protecting contemporary paintings from soil and pressure and handling are something called trays or travel frames big paintings can be put into these simple travel frames to store them to move them quickly or to protect them so period frames are really vulnerable here on the right are the padded blocks that I talked to you earlier about and I've got a handout these padded blocks are important to prevent the ornaments from falling off this frame when we want to stand it on end if I wanted to lay it face down I need a padded block across each corner going like that or going like this so that I could lay the painting down and nothing will touch this surface the paint the frame itself is wood it's also got a gesso layer that's susceptible to the water and it's got the gilding and it could be many many different types of gilding so water damages guilt frames of course because they're water soluble and you want to they could all be treated they need to be air-dried naturally and slowly here's water gilding stripped frames are usually several different types of gold so that some of it is water soluble and some is not in this instance the water gilding has completely been removed from this bar we're now looking right at the gesso frames are very valuable and very important and collected sometimes in their own right so you want to clean them only with a soft brush by holding your vacuum nozzle close to it but not touching it and you want to save all the parts into a bag so that they could all be put back in place because every part that's missing has to be cast and recreated making it a very lengthy treatment so save these parts if at all possible so here's a frame conservation from highly soiled on the left pieces being replaced that were missing and on the right completed and looking back in an exhibition condition this frame is very valuable and it makes the painting more valuable to have its original frame frames also often have inscriptions that need to be read and titles so here's a painting with impasto you could never lay this painting down unless it's on a soft cushion if you were to look at it carefully you would have seen that it's flaking this raised paint you could never lay this face down or this would crack and fall off drying upright caused deformations in this painting because all the water went to the bottom and caused a delamination right here so when you're drawing a painting out turn it around several times periodically so that the water doesn't all go to one end if it possible so salvaging water damage paintings risk analysis aids in your planning so since water poses one of the most serious threats and most effects occur within the first five to fifteen minutes you need to have a plan to move these sensitive paintings rapidly mold develops afterwards in continued high humidity but not immediately it might take two days maybe for the mold to begin possibly an elimination of risk is the first step in any disaster and that's in the planning so plan for salvaging your paintings before disaster all your storage should be six inches off the floor void overhead water pipes drop cloth high risk areas with polyethylene drop cloth vulnerable surfaces if unglazed contract with conservators in advance know where your nearest conservators are so that you can call them right away and know your collection's individual sensitivities all of these things will help you rescue more and save more but after a wet disaster establish a priority of rescue away from the water source how you which one's out to remove first I think most highly valued then the least damaged then the slightly damaged severely damaged leave to law to last you know unless they're the most important so tools that you might need you will need all of these things some of the things I want you to see particularly are this gray what we call open cell foam is very soft you can lay an impasto painting on it carefully this is ethophome it's white it's closed cell foam and it's if you use too much of it it's as strong as concrete but you could use this for cushioning but you really need to consider the weight and how much ethophome to use this is what we call a smoke sponge it's vulcanized rubber it's used by every remediation company to clean the walls clean furniture we use it to clean hard surfaces we might use it to test to see if there is smoke and it's you use this and you literally keep turning it inside out to get a clean surface here is a very soft brush and these three brushes would be ideal for gently brushing the surface of fragile paintings here is a dust mask this is a different type of a half face respirator if you were in a mold situation definitely wear one of these be sure you're fit tested so it fits properly optimizers are really help be helpful and you're going to need pushpins and boxes for things a measuring tape a magnet and any other lots of tools that you probably have already listed in your go kits so these are the tools this atomizer here often used for spray you can also get a large sprayer that used for spraying paint or insecticide but make sure it's a clean one don't use one that's been used for something else before make sure it's a new one weary pads for pets are great for absorbing liquids easy to find your biggest problem in an event is where can you even get supplies so here's your smoke sponge being used to clean the back but before using a smoke sponge try to vacuum with a HEPA vacuum because sponges on canvas will just smear certain things into it so if you can vacuum first and brush with sponge second so facings are paper that we glue to fragile paint to hold it together till a conservator can really fix it and here toilet paper was the only paper one could get really quickly you can also use Kleenex you could use paper towels or if you were lucky you could use wet strength tissue that a conservator actually has here's another painting faced again in the fragile locally phased in fragile areas now they did this emergency facing with toilet paper and the glue was an adhesive that we know is called aquasol 200 which is mixed with water and isopropanol if you buy household isopropanol it's already diluted 70% with water which is ideal for trying to rid soot I mean that's a mold so here's a historic house in Galveston and here's a really good example of moving paintings and quickly having to stand them up here we've got cardboard interleaving here there's no cardboard but the frame is resting on another frame so the canvas is protected there's no denting going on here they brought in a big humidifier they're already dehumidifying the house the floorboards were warping already and they've actually had to bring in power because in a major event like this there's no power your HVACs down and you're going to rely on companies to get you up and running really fast let me see I'm not sure how far more I have prepare a work area away from the water source and try to keep your relative humidity below 70% if you can prepare tables with a padded surface covered with plastic blotters you're going to use a lot on smooth paintings padding you can actually put blankets down and cover with plastic to make a padded layer textured impasto you really have to keep on on foam prepare padded blocks for ornate frames this portrait by Tishon is in a hand carved very ornate frame highly valuable it's on padded blocks to lay this down I would need more blocks face down drying of paintings with no impasto it's possible this little diagram shows blood a source of soft table a painting a blotter a rigid support and then weights on top of the rigid support to bring the blotter in contact with the wet surface these blotters have to be changed routinely and really you need a conservator on board to guide you with this treatment so hands on salvage for drying of stable smooth canvas paintings immediately remove the excess water tilt it to one corner to drain it if you can then check the breaking light for insecurities unframe it if you can the frame unless the stretcher is warping if the stretcher itself is warping and curling in the frame may hold it from warping it's not warping remove it once it starts to warp add you can add crossbars quickly just to prevent the stop the warping you want to check for labels and if you're taking things out of the frames remember that the frames have important provenance material on them so don't just throw them away if you have to bag them to save for later here we're doing face down blotting of excess water and this is a one of the pee pads it really works beautifully you can cut them with scissors easily to fit in they're soft and they will pick up a lot and diapers are also another tool for waking up water really fast so blotter drying you might want to cut blotter into strips just to slip behind stretcher bars to help get that water out there's also dirt behind stretcher bars so once it's wet that dirt gets pulled up into the canvas and when you're when you're putting a blotter behind a bar don't overlap them because the overlap will create a pressure dent and actually damage the painting you want to keep it as flat as possible you want to cut the corners off to avoid the keys and you want to cover the blotter with a rigid support like you saw in that picture if it's going face down put something on it to keep it in contact and you're going to switch the blotter as often as you can so blotter drying you're going to wait the stretcher on the corners to minimize warping you might put a temporary crossbar in if necessary you're going to watch it you're not going to walk away and leave it unless you absolutely have to you're going to change your blotter every 10 minutes then you're going to change it every 30 minutes and then you're going to replace it and wait for 24 hours so drying paintings you're going to always contact a professional conservator use your cell phone skype whatever you can don't remove paper tissue or newsprint from the surface if it's stuck when there's large number of paintings establish a system of priorities which we talked about because not all paintings are going to react as violently as others so drying problems can be extremely high impasto you're going to have to lay on deep open cell foam or paint or face it up up and support on foam blocks torn paintings you want to dry face up and when dry you want to tape that tear temporarily flaking in secure paintings you want to dry face up slightly elevated professional conservator might come in and put a facing on for you water soluble paint laders players don't blot you want to air dry face up panel paintings and frames must dry slower we've seen that you could tent them with with polyethylene temporarily if the gilding is damaged don't touch it just dry it face up oversized paintings dry flat due to the weight usually canvas board and pulp board weight them down to a dry surface and accelerate the wicking on that would be on blotter and drying aids you can actually use a negative pressure cold table in a lab if you have a conservator so here's a painting with impasto you can lay face down on a soft cushion and here's a shrinker that has arrived wet after a water spill one night at city hall it was a shrinker and i believe this happened probably in the first 10 to 15 minutes and here's the treatment again to restretch it from all around all the edges and into a humidity chamber to regain lost dimension and this painting was completely saved even though when you looked at it you thought oh my goodness it's a loss it was not restoration shows that even with tears and paint losses we can in paint and mask that damage bringing it back to an exhibition condition and here's a painting another painting which a lot of people would say is a total loss throw it away because it had insecurities it had a major tear all across it major deformations but this is of the eerie canal transmitted light shows how big the tear is all the losses here is all the tenting and here's the same painting two locations before and after treatment and here's the painting again on the bottom right filled before in painting and up at the top completely treated and ready to reframe so in Haiti here we were confronted with piles and piles of damaged paintings here's a here's impromptu uh breathable dust cover they used bed sheet was great because they because there was no there was high humidity the hvac and power was off even fans couldn't be kept running here's a fractured masonite support which could be restored save all the pieces this is david geist in Haiti one of the cert members actually doing this treatment here in Haiti is another large painting note the corner draws as the high humidity is beginning to take a toll in this painting hanging in an office and outdoor murals had to be structurally supported because the earthquake structurally damaged the walls they were about to fall down but sheared up with all of this they were savable and here inside one of the museums in Haiti they quickly had to stand paintings up against the wall of other paintings that were still in a good location a safe location and on the right unfortunately they are rolling this painting face in and it's already getting ridges on it that's the wrong way to do it it needs to be rolled face out almost to the end here we come so there's piles of paintings and these were all dry and this was in a gallery called the net our gallery literally several hundred paintings in piles and temporary storage this giant tractor trailer truck was phenomenal they were able to the building was a was a complete pile of rocks anything they rescued they were able to put inside on temporary shelving and they had to had to actually move it because it turned out that it was directly in the sun but they moved it to a shady location and checking the environment they were able to begin to control it not getting it turning into a terrarium and hundreds of paintings to store were really overwhelming as you looked at them but many of these paintings are on masonite they were easy to store as long as they were quickly they were dry and as I end my talk with you today I just want to say that oversized paintings have been our special interest since the 80s and some paintings like upper in the upper left hand corner here we are rolling huge morris louis colorfield paintings for shipping here's the size of a sonotube that a painting came in completely faced that we're now removing a wax facing from and we're wearing our respirator because we're using a lot of solvent this painting this large painting here is being held up by an a-frame on each corner here we are working for 40 feet in the air from genie lifts cleaning the surface of a mural and on this one we're we're actually on top of a painting over a table lying on top of a folding ladder to allow us to in paint the center of a historic theater curtain so I want to thank everybody for hanging in here today in this unusual talk and I hope you can all go back to the notes and take notes if you need to since I had to go through this rather quickly at the end and if you have any questions don't hesitate to email me again asking for help there's much more available online and I'm sure you're going to learn a lot from this you're going to need every little bit of problem solving you have thank you and goodbye okay well thank you so much Susan um I did put in the chat window if anyone had questions to share those and I didn't see anyone typing them in and since we are running low on time um I'll just go ahead and wrap up the presentation today by saying I think a good takeaway from Susan's talk is that paintings that might look like a total loss may not be so it's important to consult with the conservators and see what might be possible with some the treatments that Susan has discussed here but also I think there are a lot of really helpful tips for the basic principles of how to handle paintings and also just some information about all the different types of terrible things that can happen to these works so thank you so much Susan for sharing this information and um oh quick question um from Isabel uh so we roll the painting on a sonotube or not if you're can you hear me if your painting is unsupported and you need to support it you can roll it face out onto a sonotube but I would cover the sonotube if possible with polyethylene put it on the outside pull it to the inside and staple it in place from the inside then you're going to have a more archival roll great thank you for addressing that and Steve just wrote in here um to not forget about the heritage response team hotline so yes a reminder you know Susan and many of the other presenters here are members of the national heritage response team so they can be accessible via the 24-7 hotline but again that you know is a great resource for you all with this group of around a hundred conservators and archivists and their collections care professionals who can provide some more detailed specifics on dealing with these kind of objects and again Susan was very generous in providing her contact information if you all have follow-up questions specific to paintings so um again thank you all for your extreme patience in getting this session started today I'm very grateful for that and hope to troubleshoot that issue for all future programs but I hope you all found this to be as interesting as I did and I look forward to seeing most of you back here same time same place Wednesday next week for Andrew Robb's presentation on electronic media and photo salvage thanks again