Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Me vs. Varnish - Varnish: 1 / Me: 0

Today I have for you the ups and downs of working with traditional materials and how the day was saved by my dear wife, Achsa...

When my paintings are approved by a client or I decide a personal piece is finally finished I ready them to be varnished so that they can then be framed. Varnishing is suppose to be a fairly straight forward process and something I have been doing for a little while now. Mostly varnishing has all been happening behind the scenes without much issue or concern. That all changed recently.

I was a little behind in varnishing my paintings and was tackling several all at once when it all went horribly horribly wrong. I still do not know what actually happened, but the varnish ended up streaked, drippy, and pretty much unacceptable. It seemed to happen when I was not looking. It went from completely fine to ruined in a blink of the eye. I was trying to stay positive about all of it and make the best of it, but in the end, the varnish was ruining these paintings. It was not necessarily obvious when you looked directly at the painting, but a little cross light showed the extent of the problem...

Everything is perfectly fine, nothing to see here...

This is when Achsa stepped in to save the day. Thankfully I was using a removable varnish (Liquitex Soluvar - Gloss) which meant that there was some hope of fixing the situation. Starting with the least precious of the paintings, Achsa attempted to smooth out the rippled areas of the surface, trying to be as noninvasive as possible...

Using a solvent (mineral spirits), Achsa brushed down the ripples and imperfections in my horrible varnish application.

While the attempts to smooth the surface were effective, they were not perfect. After several passes to simply refinish the surface of the varnish, Achsa decided that if the problem was to be addressed that she would need to remove the varnish completely and start over.

More images of Achsa working on the surface layer of the varnish.

While I don't think I would have been able to do it myself, Achsa removed the varnish from the paintings without any real concern or issue. This was done while I was not around to witness it or to freak out about it. Once the varnish was removed from the surface of the painting and it had dried Achsa reapplied the varnish to the paintings in a better more controlled process, which turns out to be far superior to whatever I had been doing. A quick glance a the painting's surface can show the difference...

Everything that was wrong is right again...

Achsa has stepped up to take on varnishing duties for my paintings. She jokes that I did a bad job so that she would do it for me, but there is no way I would intentionally risk multiple paintings to get out of something I was already happily doing. In the time she has been varnishing my paintings the quality has greatly improved and all of my paintings are now in better hands.

Fixed and with a fresh application of varnish, 4-LOM is now framed up and finished.

That is all for another exciting Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com

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