Watch the video

Watch the excerpt (minutes 8:22 to 13.44) of the video "Restoring Rothko", uploaded onto YouTube on 13 May 2014 by Tate (http://youtu.be/AGqAggmwyMU?t=8m22s). If you click on the link you will access the excerpt directly, while if you click on the embedded video below you will see the entire video from the beginning. If you have trouble following the video, click here to read the script of the selected excerpt.

This is a short excerpt from the script. Read it carefully and do the exercises below.

"The maroon paint has at least one layer of paint less than the black, and it also has no glazing layers on it. And, as a result, the maroon paint on this painting is more vulnerable to physical disruption, it’s more vulnerable to solvents and it’s generally more porous. So in that sense it was also more vulnerable to the ink that was applied to the surface during the incident.
[…]
I’m quite nervous about using suction techniques, purely because up to now I’ve had absolute control over the application of solvents because I’ve been using my own hand and I’ve been able to apply the solvent with a very high level of precision. There’s always the worry that as the solvent is dragged through the paint system and through the canvas it may cause the ink to spread both at the front and at the back. After extensive testing with suction techniques on the test samples, we decided not to take it forward onto the painting, because of the amount of solvent we were using and the amount of pressure we were also exerting on the surface of the painting to get just very, very minimum results. What we’re going to do in the next couple of days is to rethink the solvent blend, possibly work with something that’s a little faster evaporating, so it doesn’t spend so much time in the paint film."