Fresco From Scratch

Barbara Sullivan works in fresco, one of the oldest known forms of painting. It is not practiced extensively today, requiring time-consuming, precise preparation of the ground into which the paint is worked. Fresco artists paint into plaster. Think Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.
Think Rafael, Diego Rivera.

Sullivan is not a muralist in any traditional sense, but in the same way that their work recorded the compelling subjects of their day on a broad “canvas,” Sullivan’s pieces explore contemporary culture in a big way through this age-old form of lime and water, granite dust and hand-ground pigments.

And much as you’d recognize a Michelangelo, you’d also know a Sullivan once you saw her work. Like old masters, she works in buon, or true, fresco, but the rest is all hers. She loves color and uses it freely. Her palette is intense and wide-ranging. But what truly sets Sullivan apart is the 3-D nature of her pieces, often an assemblage of bas relief sculptures—a spatula, a woman sitting under a hair dryer in a beauty parlor, a five-foot cornstalk. Her exhibitions document our regular lives, with titles like Beauty Parlor and Repair: The Workshop. They stand both as unified wholes and as individual sculptures. Her most recent, Food Process, was her biennial solo exhibition at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland. The overflowing shopping carts and high-fructose juice containers, open cupboards and giant bees, drivers and fast-food drive-through windows are only a small portion of a world in which Sullivan sees “the personal and the domestic as political.”

Seventh in a family of nine, Sullivan was born in Skowhegan, raised in Bingham and Waterville. Her dad was a family physician, her mom did “lots of crafts,” and the whole family was recycling long before most of the world.

Today she lives and works two miles from the recently renovated South Solon Meeting House. Built in 1842, its interior was transformed in the 1950s when students and staff from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture covered every available interior surface with fresco paintings—on ceilings and walls, in the vestibule, the main hall, behind the pulpit. And now Sullivan, whom the University of Maine Museum of Art calls Maine’s foremost fresco artist, draws from the energy of this “fabulous” place.

For years she was an oil painter, but she was never happy working flat. When fresco entered her life, so did shape. And size. As her workspace has expanded—she now occupies an oversized garage just a few steps from her house—so has the vision of what is possible. Here she creates full-room installations as well as life-size pieces like the cookstove on her dining room wall and the blonde pony-tailed woman who is hanging clothes along her hallway staircase.

Sullivan attended Montserrat School of Art in Massachusetts and Concept School of Art in Portland before receiving her BA from the University of Maine at Farmington and her MFA from Vermont College. In addition to teaching painting and drawing at the University of Maine at Farmington, she also presents fresco workshops in a variety of settings in New England and New York, including a monthlong intensive at Colby College each year.

Sullivan is currently at work on a project pairing “poets and painters and players” in various configurations. She has been asked to work with a poet. Anything, she says, is possible as two disciplines have a conversation in the language each knows. That delights her.

That’s a big family, nine children.

You’re not kidding, and we’re all fiercely independent. We’re very self-reliant. My parents did an amazing job. There was no division of labor. We all learned to cook and sew, to fix things, to recycle. We each were encouraged to find our own place. And I’ve been the artist, the maker person from the time I was a little kid. I was always making hideous clothes for myself and my dolls, designing little patterns out of Kleenex. My mother said I was born a hundred years too late because I liked to do things the hard way. She may be right.

What attracted you to fresco?

Initially, I think, it comes from having been a mason’s tender. I really got involved with rocks and mixing cement. I like the quality of the material. I had been an oil painter, but like so many artists I did many other things. And one of those things was cooking at the Skowhegan School for eight years. I was the first artist cook they had and so they offered me a studio. It was near the fresco barn. Sometimes I’d drink beer with those guys at night and one night someone said, “You’d be really good at this.” And they were right. I took to it immediately. I don’t know that I’d be doing fresco work if I hadn’t been a cook at Skowhegan.

Fresco, it seems to me, requires both patience and speed.

I think that’s true. Because the painting is very immediate, but it’s laborious getting everything ready. I draw on plywood; then I cut it out with a jigsaw. I make an armature. I stretch wire lathe over that and then the arriccio—that’s the rough coat of plaster. Over that I put a smooth coat of plaster. Meanwhile I’ve already ground the pigment, and so then I mix it with distilled water, and, of course, I then paint while the plaster is still wet. There’s a lot of timing to consider.

Why wet?

A true fresco isn’t painted on the surface of the plaster. Those little particles of pigment are suspended in the water for the time it takes me to paint. The water is not the binder; it’s a vehicle to get the paint to the plaster, which is the binder. It’s sucked into the plaster, and the image becomes an integral part of the wall. You could scrub and scrub and scrub but the image will not wash away.

Some fresco painters have plasterers prepare the surface. But you do it yourself.

Right, I do. Often plasterers do prepare a wall for a painter, particularly with murals. They also prepare the cartone, the big sheet of paper they’ve drawn on so they can make little pinpricks to dust a coat of charcoal or sienna to transfer the image to the plaster. But I do everything.

You take on serious contemporary subjects with a sense of humor and whimsy. Is that duality important to you?

I’m interested in that little ironic twist and I’m really interested in using the fresco in a narrative way but not necessarily telling a story. I want my viewer to be able to participate in that, to have to figure out what’s going on. Through that they end up bringing themselves to the work. Most of my subjects are the everyday stuff of life.

Why is that?

I think those are the things that end up binding people together. The last show I did was Food Process and that’s what it was about, the food process, like where food comes from and the relationships people have developed with people at a drive-up window as opposed to sitting around a table eating with family and loved ones.

So there’s the celebratory nature about food and then there’s the commentary about the culture.

Definitely. I’m interested in saying something. I have no interest in making fluffy, pretty work.

When you create an installation like Food Process or Beauty Parlor, you sell individual pieces. What happens to what is left?

Sometimes they live in my studio and other times I’m able to merge subject matter and give them a new life, not unlike everyday things. You know when you renovate a kitchen and replace some items or repaint, but you hold on to some of what you have. I’ve seen pieces recombined in new ways create entirely different conversations.

Is fresco taught much in schools?

No. Skowhegan is one of the few places where it’s taught. And really there aren’t that many frescoes in this country. It always amazes me that people are intimidated by it as a medium. Really, cavemen did it.

Have you ever considered that your work may be seen as preserving a culture much as the old frescoes have done, withstanding the ravages of time in remarkable ways?

You mean like Pompeii or something?

Yes.

Hmmmm.