Here we have Artemisia again.
You can see it here, now we've done the treatment
that you saw before.
So, all the glue paste that was on the surface,
the brittle glue, has been scraped off to reveal the original surface.
You can also see the edges now:
we've worked on these to clean and remove any of the glue and we've
also worked on the seam.
So this is the seam here, which is now repaired,
and we've put some small inserts of additional new canvas here and here,
two little losses that were in the seam, and there's also a new piece of canvas here
- a small insert.
We've also repaired the tear from the back and the front and you
can see it here from the back so that's nice and flat
and the whole surface is ready for the next treatment.
It's very smooth. We've removed any debris,
anything from the previous lining. It's ready for the next lining.
What we're going to do now is a moisture treatment which means that we will
gently mist the back of the painting with some water and then take it to the
vacuum table where we apply some pressure and some gentle heat so that we
can flatten undulations on the surface
As you've seen, I've just sprayed the back of the painting with some deionized
water and we've put it on to this table, which is heated now at about 40 degrees centigrade.
That allows us to flatten the picture. Before there was some slight
undulations at the edges and there were some raised cracks in these sort of
areas which I've gone over also, with a hot spatula from the front, in order to
try and push those down a little bit; just massage them a little bit.
They won't go entirely, they won't disappear entirely, but they will go down a little
bit and the reason why we have this white polyester sheeting here is that,
because there are residues of old glue left in the picture, we would need a
release sheet between the painting and the metal top. Otherwise we will end up
with the painting stuck to the metal surface and this painting will not stick
to this polyester so it acts as a very good release sheet.
The table itself is specially engineered and custom-built for our profession.
It has a very controllable heat source so, at 40 degrees we know the whole surface, more
or less, is at forty degrees and the vacuum we can have very good control
over as well. At the moment we've got about 30 millibars which is
quite a gentle pressure.
As you can see, we can see the topography of the surface
quite precisely so if there are any lumps in the surface, due to anomalies in
the weave at the back, we can address that later before the lining happens.
The good thing about this treatment, particularly before
doing an aqueous lining treatment, is that it gives us an idea of how the
painting is going to respond to moisture before we do that treatment and gives us
more confidence when we come to do the lining.
We will now leave this painting on here for the next few minutes and then we'll
start to dry and cool the picture at the same time and that will take a several
hours to complete, until it's back to room conditions.
you