Yet until recently its appearance was impossible to judge; a restoration in the 1950s had intentionally applied a golden varnish to convey an 'Old Master' quality, compounding the disfigurement of earlier
overpaints.
It was process that began shortly after the work was discovered - heavily veiled with
overpaints, long mistaken for a copy - in a small, regional auction in the US in 2005.
Using these configurations as skeletal structures, Bogat
overpaints and reworks the image to enhance or diminish contrasts, playing with the notion of figure/ground relationships.
Bull overpaints his own and others' artworks, loosely reassembling fragments rather than unifying them.
The style"culminate[s] in Lux Eterna: MayJune 1958, the only 'stripe' painting in which the bars of colour are laid consistently on to a painted ground, and in which passages were scraped down and overpainted" (Gooding 127, illus.
Or we might try to detect
overpaints, which are touch-ups done by other painters or conservators.
Elsewhere, Kaphar discards frames entirely--presenting canvases in disheveled heaps, like discarded garments--or
overpaints turn-of-the-century portrait-studio photographs, turning white to black and finagling prosperous sitters into mixed marriages.