Emerging Conservation Professional
Historic Reconstructions: Processes
Throughout my undergraduate studies in Art Conservation, I was able to explore historic materials and techniques for painting and drawing. Under the supervision of Assistant Professor Brian Baade, I gained experience in working with inks and quills, egg tempera, gilding, and more. Below are some examples of my reproductions of historic art with explanations of my processes.
This project taught me how to mix my own ink, made from lamp black and water, as well as how to cut my own quills from sea gull feathers. This endeavor was invaluable in increasing my understanding and appreciation of ink drawings.
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One of my biggest challenges when recreating this work was cutting and sharpening my quills.
Ink & Quill
Recreating an encaustic Fayum portrait was definitely a learning experience. Painting with melted wax was unlike any paint I had ever used before: it dries almost as soon as your brush touches the panel!
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In class, we used heated palettes to keep our paints liquid and to make them easier to mix. We also used heated brushes, such as the one pictured to the right, to adjust the wax paint once it was dried on the panel. While these tools would not have been available in the first millennium in Egypt when and where these paintings were made, we at least got a better understanding of the encaustic medium from this process.
Encaustic
Fresco
For this project, we each picked a part of a fresco to recreate in class, as all of our images were always made to scale. We prepared our supports by attaching a metal wire grid to the wooden frame and adding the lime plaster over it. Because a true, or "buon" fresco can only be made while the plaster is wet, we had to recreate our images in one single sitting. This image took about 6 hours to complete.
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The materials we used were lime plaster, brushes, and historically-accurate mixtures of pigments in water, as the plaster acts as the binder of the paint itself on a fresco.
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The biggest challenge when making a fresco is that you are not sure how the colors will change once the plaster is dried, except that they will lighten, making it difficult to accurately match the colors from the original image.
Photo Credit: Raychelle Osnato
Egg Tempera
Egg tempera is perhaps the most challenging medium to work with out of all of the ones I used for recreations in these classes. The paint is thin, yet it dries almost immediately when it touches the prepared gesso panel.
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I started the painting by laying down the green earth layer that traditionally served as the base for the skin tone in Medieval Italian painting, Then by painting my mid-tones and dark tones on top of that, as light tones should be added later. It took a long time to build up the layers and get the painting to look like the original. This painting experience was different from anything I had attempted before.
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Once my painted figure was completed, I mordant-gilded the background using a tacky adhesive to adhere the gold to the gesso. Mordant-gilding results in a more matte gold color than other types of gilding.
Pictured here is the prepared panel with red bole applied, the squirrel-hair brush for applying the gold leaf, a brush for applying water to the bole, and the burnishing and punching tools for finishing touches.
This picture shows me burnishing the gilded panel with an agate wolf tooth to obtain the shiny quality of water-gilding. Photo Credit: Raychelle Osnato
This picture shows the finished product after gilding, burnishing, and applying punchwork and sgraffito.
Pictured here is the prepared panel with red bole applied, the squirrel-hair brush for applying the gold leaf, a brush for applying water to the bole, and the burnishing and punching tools for finishing touches.
Water-Gilding
In order to learn the technique of water-gilding, we each created our own designs for a small panel, rather than recreating a historic work. Our designs had to include other traditional methods of decorating gilded panels, including:
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Pastiglia: Built-up gesso sottile that creates a three-dimensional design. This can be seen in the shape of Saturn in the center of the panel.
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Sgraffito: Egg-tempera painted onto the gilded surface and then scratched off to create a two-dimensional design. This can be seen in the black paint around the borders and on the rings of Saturn in my finished product.
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Punchwork: Using punching tools to dent the gesso under the gilded layer to create a surface decoration. This can be seen in the constellations surrounding Saturn in my finished product.
The panel was prepared first by sanding, then by applying a size layer of animal glue and fabric. After that, a thick layer of gesso grosso was applied and then sanded to a smooth, even plane. Then layers of gesso sottile were applied on top and sanded, after which we spent weeks building up the layers of gesso sottile into our pastiglia designs. Then, the red bole was applied and sanded with horsehair cloths. Finally, the water-gilding process could be started. The process was very challenging, and took nine hours to complete in a single sitting so that the bole did not dry out. To adhere the gold to the panel, a pool of water was placed on the bole in the desired area, and then the sheets of gold leaf would be picked up with the static energy of the squirrel-hair brush and placed on the pool of water. The bole would immediately absorb the water and the gold would be adhered. Two to three layers of gold leaf were applied over the entire surface of the panel. Then, once all of the layers were adhered, I had to wait about an hour for the bole to dry enough to burnish the surface. Once the gilding process itself was done, we applied the egg tempera sgraffito and punchwork.
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Overall, learning this historic technique was incredibly valuable and it gave me a new appreciation for gilded paintings and frames. Due to the incredibly time-consuming and delicate nature of this task, I would not choose to do it again, but I am glad that I tried my hand at this historically-significant process.