The National Art Gallery, Singapore

Pulling the Horse

May 4th, 2010

Title: Pulling the Horse
Artist: Yeh Chi Wei
Accession Number: 1993-01348
Conservation carried out by: Selina / Diana / Anthony
Treatment Date: 18/02/2010 – 11/03/2010

Week 1

This is the last Yeh Chi Wei painting that we had to work on. It just came in this morning to our lab and the first thing we noticed was the huge size of the painting, unlike all the other paintings by the artist in our collection. The canvas has been stretched onto a plywood board and was framed. The back was not supported by any bracings, so it was prone to sagging, because of the thinness of the plywood board.
Due to the size and the materials involved, it was very very heavy – especially when Diana and I were left to manoeuvre it around – luckily we have super power!

Front of painting with ‘facings’ on areas of paint losses

Back of painting

The painting came with ‘facings’ which were applied with water-reversible adhesive and Japanese paper on the front to temporarily secure all flaking paints and losses. Mar had done it as a first aid measure during her check when it came to HCC.
We noticed that painting has a lot of severe bulges – most likely from changes in the canvas tension due to reaction to the environment. These bulges were quite distracting, so we wanted to try to reduce it by restretching the canvas to return the tension. But first of all, we had to remove the huge painting from the frame – which is another task on its own.

Diana and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to remove the painting from the frame, as we found out that the canvas has been nailed directly onto the plywood board support and the frame with nails. Unfortunately the paint looks quite old and loose – like his other paintings in the collection. So to remove the nails may cause the paint to detach in the process. We decided to do some facing on the back of the painting where the loose paints are, to secure them temporarily before we remove the nails.

Back of painting after brown tape was removed

We found an inscription on the back of the frame in pencil “Oil Paint” and “Modern Art” – which is interesting. It made me wonder who wrote it – whether it is the artist, the framer or someone else and when it was written. I wondered why the person wrote “Modern Art” – was this artwork considered as modern art back then? Hmmm…
During the removal of the painting from the canvas, much to our discomfort, we found a lot of paints were detached around the edges despite our careful precautionary measures, particularly on the bottom and top, where there are a lot of varnish drips. It looks as though the varnish hasn’t dried when the person decided to frame the painting, which had caused the wet varnish to become attached to the frame rebate. We stopped to contemplate what to do next, but we realised that we have continue and modify our next treatment approach.

Week 2-3

After the successful, yet heart wrenching removal of painting from the frame, we removed all the facings, and started consolidating the loose paints and paint losses with isinglass – a natural water-based adhesive which was produced from sturgeon glue. We had to use hot spatula after we applied the adhesive, to ensure that it penetrates into the cracks and provide good adherence between the canvas and the paint layer. It was quite fun to work together with Diana on this, because it is such a big painting and if I had to do it on my own, it would’ve taken me forever to do, and not to mention lonely at times.

Applying isinglass adhesive on paint losses

Go team!

After the consolidation was done, we removed some staples from the area of the canvas bulges. We then restretched and restapled the canvas. Afterwards, we applied some glass weights on top to reduce the bulges. This treatment worked on some parts closer to the edges which did not have the prominent bulges. However, on areas where canvas deformation occurred more prominently, it was less successful. We also tried to humidify this area and flatten it, but unfortunately, due to the age of the canvas and the canvas memory of the deformation, the treatment only reduced it slightly. We decided to live with it, as we don’t want to cause too much stress on the painting by doing too much to it.

Week 4

Once this was done, we had to fill areas of paint losses and do inpainting. This is to return the overall image integrity of the painting. This treatment is also important to prevent further paint losses or breakage due to snagging, especially on the areas around the edges which will come in contact with the frame. We made our own fillers using mixture of chalk with water-soluble adhesive to level the areas of loss to the surrounding paint layer, before we applied the paint on top of the fill.
Inpainting is my favourite part of the treatment, because it involves colour matching and colour mixing. In conservation, we often use old-school techniques. So we would mix our own colours using raw pigments with any chosen binder. In this case, we used a water-soluble conservation binder to make our inpainting media. We don’t use the same media as the original painting, so that in the future, conservators can remove our work if required, and also it is important to be able to distinguish our retouching from the original layer.

Mixing colours for inpainting

Paint loss before treatment

During infilling treatment (filled area not to be mistaken as a smiley face)

After inpainting treatment

Week 5

After treatments were done, the painting was returned to its frame. This time, we used brackets instead of nails, to ensure easier removal in the future (unlike how it was nailed directly on to the frame).
However, as we noticed earlier on that the plywood board has the tendency to sag, we decided to make an extra support on the back. We discussed this at length together with Anthony, and decided that the painting will benefit from extra wooden bracing support on the back. These wooden bracings are easily removable in the future if necessary.

Back of painting before treatment

Back of painting with added wooden bracings

And voila! We are very happy with the result, even though people may not be able to see our invisible work, but we know that the artwork is now stable and ready to be exhibited