Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958–1966

Matthew Skopek: I'm Matthew Skopek, the Melva Bucksbaum Director of Conservation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I specialize in the conservation of paintings in the collection and that role gives me insight into the physical nature of the paint and how it’s applied. The painting is almost entirely oil paint. Mostly titanium white, there are some black, some gray mixed in there. And there are layers, actually, of an aluminum-based paint. 

Some of it is just simply building up, like you would've built up impasto. I mean there is applying paint and then it dries and you build up more paint and you build up more paint and you carve it back. But she is going in and giving it support in some areas where she wanted to build up volume faster than just paint would allow. So while it is mostly paint–it's over two thousand pounds of paint–there are some areas where she's added fabric or wood dowels to give it additional support. 

We know that the composition changed over time, mostly based on earlier photos. So we have a sense of how the composition changed over time, how the canvas was actually expanded at one point from a smaller canvas to its current scale. And we can also see her working and carving back into the dry paint. You can see chisel marks and maybe even in a few places, it looks like maybe she was using a rasp to sort of carve back through hardened paint to change the position and change the composition.