Okay, so you have your new painting. You brought your magnifying glass with you, and you brought home a work on paper that is “real” and not a print. As we talked about last week, the biggest heartbreak with a work on paper, assuming it’s not a sneaky print, is whether it is damaged under that frame.

When I buy orchids, I immediately take them out of the pot and check their roots for rot and infestations. I don’t put them near the other plants in case an outbreak of aphids spreads to the other plants. The same idea applies to your new painting. You don’t have to worry about aphids with paintings, but the sooner you can check it out and address any issues, the better.

Another reason to take a look under the frame is simply that what is written on the back of the frame might not be accurate. This one, for example, said on the frame backing that it was of a site in Shrewsbury, England. On the back of the piece itself, though, it says that it is of the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. And it is.

The easiest thing to do is take it to a good framer. I am impatient and nosy, so I like to take it apart at home and figure out what I need or want to do with it. The down side of taking it to a framer is that you will have to make quick decisions in the shop; the up side of taking it to a framer is that they have seen it all, and will know how to handle things like tape and glue. Usually. Sometimes they kick it upstairs to a conservator.

I am sure you’ve all heard about things needing to be “acid-free” with framing and photo albums, for example. As I talked about last time, good cotton paper is always acid free. Old paper isn’t necessarily; wood pulp is acidic (this is why if you have a well and you live in the woods, you need to get your water alkalized so it doesn’t put pinhole leaks in your copper pipes, but I digress). Old framing materials were not likely archival quality, either. So the sooner you get a painting away from corrosive materials and in a neutral environment, the better.

When I am starting to take things apart, I cover my work surface with paper or cardboard or foam board to avoid the frame skittering across a wooden table and scratching it. My best-lit table in the house is my old chess table, which has delicate veneers, so I try to go gently with it.

As we saw in the take-apart videos I did on Instagram, there are a number of different types of frames. This video of a print discovery includes one of these metal modular frames, which were very popular in the 1970s to 1990s. They are easy to take apart and easy to put back together. Corroded screws need to be pushed down as you turn to make sure you don’t strip the head.

There are also wooden frames,

and as I showed in this video of another watercolor investigation, it can be a challenge to get the nails out. Again, a firm hand and a tight grip will go a long way. You need some good spring-loaded needle-nosed pliers for removing these tiny nails.

Also, there is often way too much tape. I do love those plastic razor blades, too, but those are really for removing stickers and residue from hard surfaces. Tape is a problem because the glue can corrode the paper, and it’s also partly a physical issue. Getting tape off, particularly scotch tape, without damaging the paper, that is, removing part of it, can be difficult. Sometimes, the older the tape, the more integrated with the painting it has become. Someone used double-sided tape on this one, and it’s still sticky, so it will have to be removed.

Sometimes, the glue has corroded enough that it just crumbles off the page. It all leaves some residue behind. You can see what I mean in this video of a take-apart I did on Instagram of a large watercolor.

With newer paintings on thick cotton paper, you can gently heat up the tape with a hair dryer to melt the adhesive if it isn’t lifting easily. Go slowly and reheat as necessary. And after the tape is removed, you can use one of these adhesive removing erasers, the type used in scrapbooking, to get some more of the adhesive off.

You can also try a magic eraser. Be careful, though, not to go over the painted areas with any of those items.

It’s really best if they leave a small hinge of tape, like this:

I would not recommend any home attempt at tape removal with an older painting. This one, for example, is from 1912 and the paper is very delicate.

See how the mat, the frame, the sun, etc., have all conspired to change the tone of the painting?

I do not recommend messing with one of these; take it to a conservator or conservation framer if you can. It’s expensive to do good framing, but this one is by a relatively famous guy, and worth it. Of course, it’s in a period, maybe original frame, but someone painted the frame with “radiator paint,” i.e. low-quality, flat, gold-tone paint, and that is another issue. I suspect that this particular frame is finished wood underneath, so I haven’t decided how to handle that.

I promise at some point we’ll talk about it. One of the oddest is when radiator paint was put over real gilding. (This is my mirror in my dining room; I guess someone was trying to make it more subtle and aged looking, because that real gold is really shiny. What a nightmare. /S) Thankfully, though, less of a problem. It can be carefully removed from real gold, because real gilding is metal. See the shiny bits? That’s the actual gold.

The real heartbreaker, as we talked about in my last blog post, is a sea of mucilage, or old animal glue.

This painting is from the 1920s and looks to have been reframed in the 1950s. The glue was all over the white field around the painting, too, and the painting in question is, again, old and nice and interesting. The top pic is of the back of the mat. This type of severe glue job is not something I would try to handle on my own. I have an appointment with a conservator to talk about that. Sometimes, you need to take your problem to a pro.

There is a scenario in which I might choose to cut out the piece and float it, rather than mat it. Around this particular piece, there is enough white space that I wouldn’t lose any of the painted area. But it is still also glued down to a backing board and I don’t know that I’ll have a good air bubble to get under and hope to get some easy separation. So this is why I will be going to a conservator before I try to do anything on my own. This is an expensive proposition, so do what makes sense to you. I just know I wouldn’t be happy with myself if I started going after it and ruined it, when I could have been patient and saved it.

Think about this: over the past few months, I have taken apart about 30 paintings, and this is the only one I have come across that is this much of a problem. So in the grand scheme of things, one out of 30 really isn’t bad.

You’ll notice I have said a few times that I haven’t decided what to do with something yet. I swear I do make decisions sometimes, but the rule with conservation is always to first, do no harm. If you don’t do anything, it’s better than doing the wrong thing. A lot of old paintings on canvas were damaged (again in the mid-20^th century) by well-meaning conservators and curators by being re-lined.

You can always just put it back together, do nothing, no harm no foul, and hope it doesn’t do any further damage. Live to fight another day, as it were. And as long as you like the way it’s framed, and it doesn’t have a creeping mold or something under there, it should probably be fine. In fact, as technology improves, we have better and better ways of dealing with the mistakes of the past.