The William Morris Project, Year 2, Week 2

January 10, 2013

The William Morris Project, Year 2, Week 2

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." This is week one of the Pancakes & French Fries William Morris Project, happening again, every thursday in 2013.

To recap for those of you who just dropped in on my painting restoration posts and wonder, "what are all these boring and almost identical photos of a dirty old picture all about anyway, and what does it have to do with the William Morris Project?", I am documenting the slow restoration of a nearly 100 year old oil painting, frame and all. {you could also read this.}I feel like I should move the painting restoration posts to a different day. What do you think? It's an easy post for William Morris but it might be getting old for all y'all. I would appreciate your thoughts!

This week, I'll let it ride however. The surface thermometer that I ordered at Christmas came in the mail last week, so I could finally test out the temperature of my iron. Let me tell you, tracking down a cheap surface thermometer wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. {on a side note, after the fact, I found this one, and it is waaaay nicer and cuter than the hobby shop special I ordered. And on sale. Crap.} I ended up buying one recommended in a model train forum. You can see how exciting my life has become....trolling the model train forums for enthusiastic advice on testing out the temperature of sealing irons. Anyway, it worked out. The l temperature was read, and the iron worked, sort of. More on that later.

First things first, I will tell you all that I did this week while working on my painting. After many hours of research it seemed that the accepted method of relining oil paintings on canvas involves pasting a layer of Japanese tissue paper or Mulberry paper across the face of the paint layer, to hold all the paint still while working on the back. This makes sense, you know, not rubbing the hundred year old piece of art all over your kitchen table while you press the back with a $4 goodwill travel iron. {of course that is nothing at all like what I did...cough...cough} So I bit the bullet and went for it. I looked high and low for advice on the best paste to use. What would be the most reversible, with the least amount of water? What would have the most flexibility? Isinglass was the top choice, but I wasn't about to drop $50 on glue made from the swim bladder of the Beluga Sturgeon, so...rice glue it was. I found the recipe on the website of David Bull, a woodblock artist from Japan, who I posted about earlier this week. I made some sweet rice flour with my handy dandy flour mill, cooked it, strained it, let it cool and got to work. The process was fairly scary. Glue paper to the paint? I had to let go of my instincts and trust the internet. Looking back, I might have skipped this whole step, honestly.
At least I felt like I was making progress. I turned up my laptop speakers and pretended I knew what I was doing.
Here's the problem. The canvas still had ripples and water-damage related wrinkles all over it. I couldn't stretch it out due to all the rips, but as you can see in the next photo, I added a second layer of tissue. Why not? Well, it kind of held all the ripples still along with the paint, the wrinkles wouldn't budge. Brilliant.

Perhaps, it would have been better to build myself a hot table, or maybe it would have been better to iron the canvas prior to lining it. I will never know. I am here, wandering the lands of trial and error, as anyone else would be, but with less experience. I am taking comfort in my strict adherence to the policy of keeping all restoration steps reversible. I can keep working on it, and none of it is permanent. {except, of course, the removal of the dirt. That same exact grime can never be re-deposited on the front of the painting.}
I lined the canvas anyway, bravely using a travel iron dry iron to melt the layers of lining compound and fabric together. It took about 4 times through the Spotify Taylor Swift library to get to a stopping point. I know her songs well now. So well.

This is why it took forever. The wax would melt, and then air bubbles would show up between the wrinkles in the old canvas and the flatness of the new canvas. I worked them for hours. Finally, I decided to let the whole thing rest, at around 4:30 am. If it was ruined, it was ruined. The results could wait until I had some sleep.

When I peeled off the mulberry paper, {which did come off wonderfully, along with the rice glue} I was pretty disappointed. At the same time, totally relieved. The painting wasn't black, or melted, or smudged, or ruined. The parts that I wasn't so excited about were the wrinkles, and that some of the paint tenting didn't flatten out. I am also certain that I have way too much wax on that canvas, it smells like a beehive.

Here is the current state of the oil painting, in my living room. It looks terrible, I haven't removed all the little shreds of mulberry paper from the face of the paint, and it is still ripple city. BUT, the tears are mended, and much of the paint is consolidated. Can you tell that I have thought about this way too much? I am taking a day to forget about it. Tomorrow is my birthday, after all. My plan is to A.) re-iron the canvas without the paste+mulberry combo on it to see if the wrinkles will relax. I will lay it out on Kraft paper, since it releases wonderfully from the lining compound, or, B.) stretch the canvas with pins, just like the dutch, little by little for a while to see if the canvas flattens out.