Warning! Don't use damar as a final picture varish
 

I have an old 10x8" oil on panel that was badly scratched a few years ago. I finally decided to repair it. First thing was to remove the damar picture varnish. Well, I rubbed and I scrubbed the surface with mineral spirits and then turpentine. The varnish didn't budge. Then I got serious. Knowing that I could repair any damage I would inflict (after all I had done the painting -- started in 1973, finished in 1977), I attacked the surface with alcohol and then acetone. I finally got the varnish off, but in doing so, I badly skinned the painting.
In the 28 years since I'd applied the original varnish, it had really turned yellow. When I took the varnish off, the yellowing disappeared. Damar yellows pretty fast.
Unfortunately, I didn't take a shot of the painting before removing the varnish, but this is what it looked like after I'd removed the damar. The painting is skinned!

In repairing the painting, I got a bit carried away and ended up changing a few things. I have no problem with that. It is my painting after all. This is the way it turned out.
I will give it a final varnish in three months. I will use Gamblin's GAMVAR as my final picture varnish. It is easy to apply, it won't turn yellow, and it can easily be removed with mineral spirits. If the painting survives the next seventy-five years or so, it will be easy to clean.
I recommend any "acrylic" picture varnish (based on acryloid B-72 resin). I even recommend mastic varnish. ANYTHING other than damar!
If you are not currently hooked on damar as an additive to your paint or as a final picture varnish, I suggest you stay away from the stuff all together.

Hi Bill
Thanks for pasting this comment.

Hmm, you've given me cause for concern. In 1985 I painted a 4 foot by 3 foot portrait of a young girl sitting on the back of a yacht with the sea as a background. Of course Damar Varnish was recommended as the varnish of choice at the time and I just last week decided it looked somewhat yellowed and thought perhaps I should clean and revarnish.it.

After seeing your skinned painting, I'm thinking I will be repainting as well. What was to be a little job looks like it will be a major one.
Fortunately, I didn't like the smell of damar too much so I haven't used it on anything else.

I'm thinking I might be better off just redoing it from the beginning and taking this one to the dump.. :(

Ouch!
 

Gamvar is wonderful, a tad cumbersome but worth the effort. It is colorless and easy to apply. It is made by the Gamblin company, they are familiar with working in high humidity conditions. I have a painting that fogged using damar. Because of this I called them about their varnish, as I had to varnish a painting in situ at a waterfront Newport home, they said if it works in the coastal Northwest it will work anywhere. To say the least I was nervous, but so far it has performed admirably.

I just get the stuff and shake it for 24 hours.

Sounds like the damar really took root, and so quickly. I've been using the Gamvar product hoping future cleaning of my work won't strip any of the paint off.

They ask you to agitate the solvent/resin every hour for eight hours so one option is to bring it to my mother-in-law who can agitate anyone with little effort. When she's not around I hold the Gamvar in my left hand and drink a cup of Turkish coffee. The caffeine does the rest.

Scott, you made me laugh...

I wonder rather than shaking it around every hour for eight hours, could you take it to a paint shop and have them give it a spin?

If you put the jar with some padding into a 1QT container a
paint store or even the folks at Home Depot could give it a spin at a fraction of that time.

Would there be problems using Damar in your medium?

Ah Enzie, if only life were so simple. Unfortunately these synthetic resin crystals don't dissolve immediately. In fact sometimes it takes 24 hours; it's not a buy it and use it product.

Glad I made you laugh. You should see me now gessoing panels in time to "An der schonen, blauen Donau." Now that's a laugh.

Dear Margaret,

You might be lucky and be able to remove the varnish without damaging the painting. If it hasn't been on too long, it might work. If we are truly growing in our art, we have a tendency to want to take ALL our old work to the dump. We are all a little crazy this way.

Gamvar:
I've found I don't have to be too diligent in the Great Gamvar Shake Up department. I pour the solvent in the crystals bottle and forget it for a day. When I come back, I find it completely dissolved. I shake it a bit then. If I can do it, it means it isn't hard to do.

Damar will yellow over time. No doubt about that. However, I suppose paint pigment would mask that completely. My gripe with damar in a paint medium is that it becomes sticky fast and is hard to manipulate. If I need an additive medium, I prefer to use oil only, or oil with a little mastic.

Could be because I have to smuggle the stuff over the Atlantic, it acts differently. The crystals are placed in a bath salts box and the solvent I pour into a dark green bottle and label it "Gamvar For Men: Drives Female Conservators Wild."

The things I do for art.

Several important issues have been brought up in this thread, and I think they bear discussing in maybe a bit more depth for greater understanding of the archival aspects of the various substances and practices involved. As Bill said, damar is not the ideal varnish for oil paintings, for the reasons he's stated.

Damar discolors, which means that it will need to be removed some day, and since it becomes increasingly insoluble with time, stronger and stronger solvents must be used to remove it, which solvents will also probably take off some paint as well as the varnish unless it is done very carefully by an expert conservator who knows the tricks of the trade. Here are some tips for removing old damar varnish from old oil paintings. First, though, do not try this on any but your own paintings, unless you have been trained as a professional restorer. We can always fix our own paintings if we screw them up, but if we "fix" somebody else's painting by painting on it ourselves, we have compromised the authorship of the resulting image as the work of the original artist.

A very important consideration is to start with the mildest solvent, which would be odorless mineral spirits, and keep a container of it, and some cotton balls, at the ready. OMS will not remove damar, nor will it attack oil paint films that are more than two years old. The reason to have it handy is to stop the action of the stronger solvent after it has done what you've employed it to do, before it has a chance to attack the paint. If damar is not too old yet, English distilled or double-rectified spirits of turpentine might soften it, so that should be tried before any stronger solvents. Apply it gently with a cotton swab, beginning in an area of relative unimportance, to see if it will take off the varnish. It will take a bit of time, so do not be too hasty. Never use a solvent that is any stronger than necessary for the procedure, and always have a cotton ball saturated with OMS at the ready to stop the action of the other solvent. If you see color other than yellowed or embrowned varnish or dirt on your cotton swab, immediately wipe the whole area with the OMS-saturated cotton ball, and then follow it with another one. Conservators will have a range of solvents right next to them when they clean old paintings. This will include mixtures of solvents, to adjust the strength of each. They will always start with the mildest one, and then gradually work their way up until they reach the one that will soften the varnish. Different varnishes require different strength solvents. With damar, the older it is, the stronger the solvent required to remove it.

Many of the solvents restorers work with are highly volatile and involve a risk of fire, as well as health consequences from breathing the vapors and from contact with the skin. These things are best used in environments where the risks are lowest, i.e., with good ventilation and a fire extinguisher handy, nowhere near anything that could ignite the vapors. I do it outdoors when I must use a solvent. I have a box of surgeon's gloves handy, and replace one as soon as it develops a hole. These solvents can get through the skin and into the bloodstream, and they are not good for you.

Bill might have been able to dodge the bullet on his painting if he'd had a cotton ball saturated with OMS on it to stop the alcohol/acetone before it ate into his paint. Fortunately, it was his painting, so he could fix it.

Before modern science brought us better resins for varnishes, damar was a necessary evil. It was an improvement over mastic, which shares most of its faults and has an increased tendency to "bloom" in humid environments. Gamvar is better than any of them, and perhaps its greatest asset is the fact that it remains removable with mild solvents that will not eat into dried and cured oil paint films. It is not expected to discolor, either, so the main reason why anyone would want to take it off is probably not going to be there.

Then there is the issue of natural resins in our painting mediums, added to the paint. There are several potential problems involved here. When these resins discolor, as they will, the discoloration is not reversible the way it is with linseed oil. If it's in the paint, it cannot be removed the way it can when it is a varnish on top of the paint. Secondly, these substances become increasingly brittle as they age, and will increase the tendency for cracking. On rigid panels or canvas glued to panel, this is less of a problem than on stretched canvas, but in any case it is unnecessary. And when there is damar or mastic in the paint layer, and one or the other of those resins is also used as a final varnish, the likelihood is greater that the solvent used in to remove the varnish will also eat into the paint and take some of it off, too, as it did with Bill's painting. One might get by with it if the final varnish is a modern synthetic that does not require such strong solvents to remove, but why take the chance? Linseed oil works well as a medium. Rembrandt is a good example of what can be done with oil paints without resinous mediums added. He did pretty well, in my estimation. I don't know if Bill was using Maroger medium back in the 1970s or not, but if there is any significant percentage of it in the painting he mentioned, that could well have been a factor. I know he uses very little medium, whatever he uses, and that is the best way to use a medium -- very sparingly. Most people use too much medium, and that makes for weak, problematic paint films. From an archival standpoint, linseed oil is probably the best medium to use with oil paints, but it's important to not thin oil paints too far with anything, even linseed oil.

Many of the problems that result from ill-advised choices of materials and methods of application in oil painting do not show up until the painting is 50-150 years old, so it can be very misleading to look at a 20 or 30 year-old painting that still looks pretty good and conclude on that basis that it will never develop any defects. The future is probably going to see some fine paintings suffer from various maladies resulting from materials choices made by the artists who created them. I hope Bill Whitaker's work is not not among them, because he's a top-level Master whose work I have admired from the first time I saw any of it. I'm always reluctant to comment on his choices of materials or procedures because of my respect for him, but he asked me in a private e-mail to come here and add my thoughts on this subject.

Virgil Elliott

Gamvar over Damar?
 

Hello,

I was about to varnish my first oil paintings, but then I saw this thread! I see the argument to use something like Gamvar instead, but I am hoping to quickly get a temporary varnish on a painting in order to show it and liven up the colors that dried dull. I bought some damar varnish for this purpose, intending to dilute it with turpentine.

Can Gamvar be diluted to use as a temporary varnish? Can I use the damar for the temporary varnish, and then use the Gamvar later as a final varnish?

Lacey,

You didn't say how recently the picture in question was painted. Oil paint takes a good while to cure, months after it seems to be dry, and it is best not to varnish it until it's fully cured. A premature varnishing interferes with the process of curing, which involves the incorporation of oxygen into the paint layer. Gamvar should be used at the strength that results from adding the precise amount of solvent that's in the bottle that comes with it to the resin crystals in the jar. I wouldn't recommend using it in any other way.

Whether diluted damar used as a retouch varnish would prove problematic in the long run would depend on several things, but if the painting is important to you, it would be best to leave damar out of it, and let it cure for several months before giving it a final varnishing with Gamvar. Don't be in too big a hurry to show it, if it doesn't look good without varnish on it. Six months goes by pretty quickly.

Virgil Elliott

While it's probably better not to fool with retouch varnishes and the like, I can understand why one would want to quickly simulate varnish like conditions particularly where clients are concerned.

I discovered in Gamblin's "Notes of Special Interest" you can in fact make a retouch varnish by mixing "1 part Gamvar Varnish with 5 parts Gamsol or other high quality OMS."

The question then arises whether in 6 months time the Gamvar retouch should be removed or left on before varnishing with the full strength product.

Also in his notes Gamblin mentions using cold wax medium as a matting agent. When I see the word "wax" I think of Reynolds and his questionable practices. Perhaps when wax is used in varnish as opposed to medium it's another story.

Scott,

There would be no reason to remove Gamvar retouch before applying full-strength Gamvar as a final varnish. The solvent in the final varnish would soften the retouch layer and allow it to become part of the final varnish layer. It wouldn't be a good idea to try to remove varnish from an oil paint layer that's less than two years old, anyway. Chances are some paint would come off in the process.

Wax in the varnish, used as a flatting agent, would not be harmful the way it would as an ingredient in the paint.

After an artist has painted his or her heart out on a painting, it seems wrong, to me, to then do something to compromise its longevity out of eagerness to put it out there right away. For people who cannot wait to get rid of their pictures, there is the option of painting in alkyds, acrylic, pastel or watercolor instead.

Virgil Elliott

Agreed Virgil but will using retouch varnish seriously compromise the longevity of a painting? Are Conservators saying this now, because a few years ago it was advocated, at least here in Europe.

Kind of reminds me of the doctors who warned against butter suggesting margarine was a better alternative and then latter olive oil and now no oils. What is the truth? What do you think they will be saying about Gamvar in ten years time? (I won't know because I probably will have died from an olive oil induced coronary.)

Scott,

Many questionable practices are or were advocated by one person or another, and it could be very confusing taking them at face value, since they are not all in accord. What one can do to sort things out is to consider the fundamental principles involved. Vegetable oils "dry" by a process that involves the absorption of oxygen, which takes place over a long period of time. It makes sense that to place a barrier of varnish between the paint layer and the air before this process is complete would surely interfere with the proper drying/curing of the paint. To what extent this would manifest itself adversely is an open question, but why risk harm to our own paintings?

Virgil Elliott

This is something to think about. I'm certain I'm not the only artist who retouches before a painting goes out the door. I appreciate the information.

Thanks to all
 

This has been a great source of information for me. Unfortunately, I learned to paint with oils before I learned anything about oils.

It was only a year ago that I thought it was O.K. to use Turpenoid Natural as a medium! :o

When I want to deliver a recently completed commission that has sunken-in dull areas, I "oil out" those parts of the painting with a 50% linseed/50% OMS mixture, rather than using any type of retouch varnish. That evens out the surface quite well and dries to a nice semi gloss finish.

Virgil, does this seem like a sound practice?

Michele,

Maybe. It depends on how much you leave on the surface, and on the percentage of oil there is in the paint making up the painting. If everything is right, the oiling-out oil will soon be absorbed into the paint layer, and become part of it. The painting should still be varnished after it has cured for six months to one year. If there are any heavy passages or impasto, one year would be better. I assume you always arrange to get the painting back for varnishing at the appropriate time. I make sure my portrait clients understand the importance of a final varnish, and agree to let me have the painting back a year after I've delivered it.

When oiling out, it's very important to wipe as much of the oil off as will come off, with a soft cloth, immediately after the oil is applied. Enough will remain on the surface of the painting to accomplish the purpose.

I hope that helps.

Virgil

Thanks, Virgil!

What about the Amber medium? - and Amber Varnish.?

I did believe that amber was not a resin. Is this true.?

I certainly like using it.

I would also be interested in your opinion on amber medium and varnish Virgil. I guess Tricia is referring to the Blockx product, a very expensive darkish liquid packaged in a slender glass tube sealed with a cork and red sealing wax. It's a joy to get open.

One part amber medium is mixed with 5 parts cold pressed linseed oil. Very little of the amber is needed.

Unfortunately I was unable to experiment fully with this medium being allergic to solvents, but I know a few artists who swear by it.

There are other mediums out there called amber mediums, which may or may not actually contain any amber resin, so unless I were to know which amber medium you're talking about, I can only make general comments. These all contain resin or balsam (coniferous tree sap), cooked oil and solvent. With Blockx, the oil is poppy oil and the solvent is spike oil, aka oil of aspic. There is another one by a small manufacturer that has a balsam and cooked oil in it, either walnut or linseed, a solvent (probably turpentine) and maybe some amber or copal resin in it, and there might be a few others out there with who-knows-what in them. The only one of these manufacturers whose word I would trust on what is in a product is Blockx.

Whether lots of people like to use a given medium or not is no indication whatsoever of its archival properties, nor is the apparent condition of the paintings in question when they are less than 100 years old. The people whose opinions I place greater credence in regarding these matters are the top museum conservators, who see and restore old oil paintings on a regular basis and are plugged into the international conservation community's information network. In that field, it is widely acknowledged that resins and balsams in old oil paintings are generally problematic, and that the oil paintings that have weathered the centuries best have no detectable resins in the paint layers.

Resins lack flexibility, and that is obviously a factor in the cracking of old paintings. One might or might not get by with a very minor addition of a resinous medium to one's paints, depending on many other factors. With a rigid panel support, the problems of cracking would be greatly reduced over paintings on stretched canvas.

Resins discolor, i.e., turn yellow and, eventually, brown. Bill Whitaker discovered this with his damar varnish. Once a resin has turned dark, it stays dark. It cannot be bleached back to its former appearance the way a yellowed linseed oil paint film can, by exposure to light.

Cooked oils are also looked upon as troublesome compared with unheated oils, as they are pre-oxidized (stand oil being the exception because it is cooked in an oxygen-free container).

Solvents also adversely affect the strength of oil paint films.

The mediums in question are composed of resin (and/or balsam), cooked oil, and solvent. There may or may not be driers added by the manufacturer, usually cooked into the oil, and that is another potentially problematic ingredient in the mixture, according to the best information I have come across in my studies on the subject and from my consultations with conservation experts at the National Gallery in Washington.

The 17th century artists who employed cooked oil mediums and/or cooked oil with balsam or resins only used these mediums for certain special effects in the final stages of the paintings, with most of the work done with paints composed of pigment and linseed oil, uncooked and with no resins or balsams in them. Walnut oil was sometimes used instead, but mostly it is linseed oil. It was not a matter of adding medium to all the paints, the way people love to do today. These paints were mulled to the desired painting consistency from dry pigments and unheated linseed oil, so there was no need to add anything to them. The Old Masters were not painting with modern tube colors.

In the mid-18th century is when painters began using exotic concoctions more extensively in their paints, and it is these paintings that have suffered more severe consequences as they have aged. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the poster boy for bad choices of materials, and it is probably his influence that made these concoctions popular in the first place. Reynolds's paintings are notorious in conservation circles for the many defects they have developed and for being among the most difficult to restore. Whereas the paintings of Rembrandt, a century or more older than Reynolds', have held up much better over the ages, with no resins in them. I think that is significant, and worth serious consideration.

Each painter can decide for himself/herself how important it is that the paintings he or she creates continue to look the way they look when they paint them, and how far into the future this matters. If one cares, it is probably better to leave the resins out of the paint. If one doesn't care about the future, it doesn't matter what one uses.

Virgil Elliott

Tricia,

Amber is indeed a resin. It is a fossil resin because it is very old. It started out as tree sap.

Virgil Elliott

I hope I won't sound too knowledgeable if I say that it seems that artistic community knew little about the drawbacks of using dammar up until the 90

Virgil, thanks for sharing your expertise with us here. Your contributions are very helpful!

Virgil,
I would also like to thank you for sharing your expertise.

Is there any alternative to this Gamvar Varnish?

Are you familiar with the use of Egg White for varnishing ?

Allan

I have had good luck (at least within my short artistic life, and in the practical application sense) with this product:

Liquitex Soluvar low viscosity, final picture varnish (matte finish)

and

Liquitex Soluvar final picture varnish (satin finish)

I mix these two products in a 50-50 mixture to attain the degree of matte finish that I like.

The label states that this product is "Pure acrylic spirit varnish."

The label also indicates that it may be diluted with a 25% mixture of mineral spirits or turpentine.

I'm not real sure where this falls in the above discussion. Surely this Gamvar can't be the only acceptable picture varnish.

Speaking about synthetic varnishes, I found Golden MSA varnish (with UV-filter) to be a very good one, as well. I mix the Gloss and Matte variety in order to achieve the desired sheen.

Btw, Virgil, have you received my private e-mail sent to you on your aol.com account three weeks ago?

You guys are frightening me. I have been using retouch varnish almost each morning at the beginning of my painting day. It brings the freshness of the painting back to light. It is the only way that I can add new paint to the canvas. Without it, the fresh paint looks different than the paint that I applied the day before. Especially in the shadow areas which dry chalky. Then, I apply a thin layer of painting medium by Falens, which is the medium I use throughout the painting to loosen up my paints after squeezing them from the tubes. After that, I apply a final coat of Damar varnish and have never experienced cloudiness. My work is sold in galleries for the past four years, and I haven't received any phone calls about yellowing.

1- Am I using retouch varnish wrong? If so, how can I work with the chalkiness of a painting when I want to add new paint to the painting and cannot accurately see the values and temperature of chalky paint compared to fresh paint?
2- How long after use does the yellowing of Damar varnish begin?

Soluvar is a good varnish, as long as you like the way it looks. It's what most museums used until Gamvar was invented. Gamvar has the look of damar without the yellow, so the appearance is more appropriate for certain paintings. Soluvar is my second choice.

Virgil Elliott

Allan,

Yes, I am familiar with egg white as a varnish. It's a terrible idea.

Of course there are alternatives to Gamvar. Golden's MSA Varnish is a good one, which I had forgotten about until Valentino mentioned it, and Liquitex Soluvar. Winsor & Newton's Winton Picture Varnish is also pretty good. Gamvar is my personal first choice, however. It was developed by conservation scientist Rene De La Rie, of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Virgil Elliott

Virgil,

Thanks so much for responding to my email and contributing to my post. Once again, I'm amazed by the effort and care you give to provide us good and useful information. Everybody who reads this post on damar varnish should copy your contribution and save it for reference.

All you folks out there in Oil Painting Land, Virgil really knows his stuff. Pay attention.

In 1973, I was painting without the addition of any painting/glazing medium at all. For a while I used Ralph Mayer's concoction -- stand oil plus damar resin -- but I found it very difficult to use when I wanted to do sensitive high finish detail work.

In my case, I would not have messed with the little painting at all if it had been done by anybody else. Since it was mine, I was none too careful, knowing I could repair any damage I would inflict.

Naturally, acetone cut the damar, as did denatured alcohol. It never occured to me to use mineral spirits to stop the solvent action. Oh well.

I was pretty rough on the painting when I removed the varnish. In spite of being beaten up, the painting actually held up pretty well. Paint is tougher than we expect sometimes.

I recently cleaned another painting, done in 1976 and varnished with damar. In that case, I got the varnish off without too much trouble. I don't know why. It too had appreciably yellowed -- was beginning to take on a golden tone.

Anthony,
I too use damar retouch varnish from time to time. I don't think it contains much damar, for the gloss doesn't last very long. I believe it might be mostly solvent.
You won't notice any yellowing in the final damar varnish for maybe two decades. Remember too that in the past collectors were fond of that yellowing. They called it "gallery tone." I wouldn't worry much about it. Perhaps you can get Virgil to jump in again and give you the authoritive word.

Bill

Anthony,

You can accomplish the same thing by oiling out instead of using retouch varnish, but you might need to give the painting a bit more time to dry between sittings. A very thin scrub-in of linseed oil over the area to be repainted will do the trick. Wipe off as much of it as will come off after you've scrubbed it on, before you paint into it. What remains is all that is needed. The chalky look you mention might be due to the colors you've chosen. Umbers are particularly bad in that way, burnt umber especially. I very seldom use burnt umber any more, for that reason mainly.

You can do many things wrong and not see the consequences for fifty or more years. That doesn't mean they aren't going to happen. Look to the conservation field to get an idea what holds up and what causes problems.

Virgil Elliott

Valentino,

I just looked for it and could not find it. If you still have it, please send it again. It might have been in with the mountain of e-mails that came in while I was off riding my motorcycle for a few days, and I must have missed it somehow.

Thanks for the reminder about Golden's MSA Varnish. I haven't tried it, but I know Golden's products are top quality, so I'd use it with confidence if I weren't already completely satisfied with Gamvar.

Virgil

Bill,

Thanks for the vote of confidence. It seems every time I post here, I'm deluged with questions to answer. Once my book is published, I'll just recommend people buy that and find the answers there. Watson-Guptill has sent me a contract, and is scheduling it for release in April of 2007. Meanwhile, I have a lot of illustrations to do before my deadline, so I need to put more time into that until everything is as good as I can make it.

If you're ever in my neck of the woods, look me up.

Virgil

Virgil,

A hearty congratulations! I'm so glad to hear the book is being published.

You know your stuff Virgil,

The colors that dry chalky are indeed the earth colors. Two of my favorite earth tones are Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna. They are both known for chalkiness. However, Burnt Umber with a mix of Ultramarine Blue or Prussian blue gives a beautiful warm deep shadow. I've tried other brown family colors and I enjoy Burnt Umber the most. I've also done the oil rubs, and it works very well for small areas. I guess that is the way I will have to work in the future. I was using the Retouch varnish to work the whole painting at once.

Another question though:
What is the proper use of Retouch Varnish? A friend of mine, a 65ish year old woman from Milano, who was trained in the old style studios of Italy in her youth told me that Retouch Varnish has a different use. Her English wasn't good enough to explain the proper function of Retouch Varnish, and my Italian wasn't good enough to rely on that.

I live in Shanghai, China and books are basically impossible to come by here. I naively left my Ralph Mayer book in California. Can you tell me a website that would have information on the dangers of misusing materials, and the correct ways to use them. Please don't mention Amazon.com for a purchase. I'm here rebuilding an art career after a couple of bad gallery sale years and my credit card has been melted during the crunch as my debts went through the roof. At the moment I am a part-time painter-part time English teacher.
Thank you in advance,
Anthony