Oil Painting Restoration & Cleaning
Video transcription
Hi. Welcome everybody. My name is Lars Erik Robinson and today we're going to talk about how to clean an old oil painting. First of all, if it's something that's very important to you, I would...I would recommend hiring a conservatory person to actually....to do that for you. But if you really insist on...on doing it yourself, I would take one of your other paintings that you don't really have too much sentimental value for it, and, what I would do is I would take, I would take, they have different products made by Gainesboro. That, emulsion cleaner and varnish remover. You want to have the old varnish remover taken off, because sometimes the other removers didn't use to....used to yellow the paintings or darken them. And then use a neutralizer. They have a...Gainesboro also has a neutralizer that helps neutralize and get it back to its original painting. And a gloss varnish. And as you can see, I'm just painting here. But what they actually do is, when they do the removing they use these different cleaners, and they actually take the side of the q-tip, and the remove it by just rolling over with the q-tip and the remover slowly from one corner to the next. And they keep rolling that q-tip over it, and that's how they remove the old varnish and the....and the..and how do you get it...finally get it clean. So if you see the Sistine Chapel, there's probably been somebody up there just rolling gently over the whole thing, trying to remove the whole piece. Can you imagine how long that would've taken. So, keep on trying to protect your pieces, and once again, I recommend if you don't feel comfortable with something that you feel a lot of sentimental value for, hire somebody to do it. Thank you so much for encouraging art.