Fresco depicting 23rd Psalm graces hospice chapel

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Fresco

Ben Long, Asheville-based artist, is busy at work on a new fresco in the Peace Chapel of the Hospice Center in Mount Pleasant. About two-thirds the way through, he is now concentrating on the larger figures. The fresco form is rarely used these days. The process is complex, time-consuming and expensive. Long is one of only a handful of artists working in the medium. A classical realist painter, Long has composed an allegorical image based on Psalm 23. Photographs of the work in progress can be seen here.

Visual artists today tend to use the wall in practical ways. They hang paintings on it or cast moving images upon its white surface. Often, artists apply an explanatory plaque or sticker beneath or beside their work.

Sculptors place their objects in the exhibit space using the walls of the room as a kind of framing device, for our perception of objects is partly determined by the way they relate to their surroundings.

Mass and shape define sculpture and, to a lesser extent, framed paintings, for these are objects with which the viewer interacts within a defined space. It is this interaction that influences what we think and how we feel about the art on display.

The wall, then, is typically a means to an end, a little-noticed support system.

Flatness

A certain famous painting seizes upon, and manipulates, the idea of the wall and its function to achieve a claustrophobic effect.

The iconic "Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother," an 1871 painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, shows Anna Whistler sitting in profile against a gray wall on which hangs two small pictures, and she looks straight ahead at another wall. She is doubly framed, by the painting's space, and by the space in which the painting hangs (a gallery at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris).

The effect is one of flatness, and the longer one looks, the flatter — and more abstract — the composition becomes. It's as if Mrs. Whistler, with her lacy bonnet, handkerchief and cuffs, and her long black dress, was used merely as an excuse to establish a confining space. This, the viewer is left to think, is what it means to be inside.

Space

There is a medium, rarely used these days, that achieves an effect completely unlike that of the framed painting on canvas: the fresco.

Whereas paintings are objects with which the viewer contends, the fresco is part of the space itself, not merely observed but experienced. It is a special kind of painting that's applied directly to the wall and thus transforms the wall from something that encloses into something that opens to reveal a new space.

The viewer of the fresco is meant not to stand before the image to study it, but to move through the space (both the room and the painting's terrain). Where framed paintings invite study and contemplation, frescoes invite movement. Where paintings encapsulate a story or convey a set of ideas, frescoes let the story unfold and expect the viewer to participate actively.

With paintings, one never forgets the physical space that separates the object from the viewer, a distance the eye must traverse. With frescoes, the separation between image and viewer is metaphysical.

Life

Finding someone who can paint a traditional fresco is difficult. Contemporary artists tend to favor the multimedia and conceptual art that might find a place in the Whitney Biennial. Or they are making what the late Robert Rauschenberg liked to call "combines" — mixed-media creations, or painting-sculpture hybrids.

But just up Interstate 26, in Asheville, N.C., there's an artist who specializes in classical realism with an emphasis on the human figure.

Benjamin F. Long IV, 63, is a noted painter whose work can be found in private collections, museums and corporate lobbies. He has painted portraits of former N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt, musician Boz Scaggs and his wife, philanthropist Chauncey Stillman, and author and poet Reynolds Price, among many others.

Long runs an art school in Asheville called Fine Arts League of the Carolinas. It trains artists to draw and paint from life, and its students have a rare opportunity to learn the fresco method. Ben Long is one of a handful of artists working in this medium. He has created about 20 frescoes, including the Crucifixion in a church and a baroque-style painting in a dome.

In recent weeks, he and his crew of three apprentices have been holed up in the Peace Chapel at the new Hospice of Charleston building in Mount Pleasant.

Mabel Stowe Query commissioned the project nearly two years ago, telling Long to paint an image based on Psalm 23. Query, who died recently in hospice care, gave no further instructions. So Long pulled out the Bible and read the text:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside still waters. ...

Slowly, the ideas formed. There would be a green field with figures receding in the distance. There would be a man lying down near a stream. There would be a woman drinking from a dish, the water spilling to the Earth. There would be the shadows of death but little fear. There would be youth and age, love and ambivalence. There would be a chorus of five women — goodness and mercy — restoring the soul.

Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life ...

Method

Frescoes are painted on plaster walls. In Europe, plaster walls are common. In the U.S., builders prefer Sheetrock. This means the fresco painter often must make the wall before he makes the painting.

That's what Long and his crew did early this year for the hospice project. They prepared a steel frame into which the plaster was spread, lifted the 15-by-7-foot "wall" through a window to get it into the building and mounted it with heavy brackets. Then they let it sit for three months to allow it to settle and get acclimated to the environment in the Peace Chapel.

About two weeks ago, they returned with their pencil and charcoal sketches, grid drawing, oil studies, pigments, plaster of Paris and lime, a plethora of brushes and containers, folding tables and chairs and stools, rolls of tape, palette knives and trowels.

They unrolled a full-size, charcoal-drawn "cartoon" along one wall, taped the sketches to another wall and set the oil paintings on easels. A side table was set up for grinding pigments with a wide pestle and mixing the colors with distilled water.

Getting to this point required many months of work in the Asheville studio, drawing live models, including one homeless man, who came to pose. All the figures in the fresco are based on real people, Long says.

The cartoon is used as a basis for tracing the primary lines of the image onto a semi-transparent paper. Tiny holes are punched along the lines. The crew then lays the tracing paper over the wall and "pounces" small gauze bags filled with red-earth pigment upon the surface. In this way a simple outline is transferred to the wall itself, and it is used to create a slightly more extensive sinopia layer, or underdrawing.

Then comes the intonaco stage. As apprentice John Dempsey mixes pigments, Christopher Holt and Nathan Bertling prepare a new batch of plaster mixed with lime. A small segment of the wall is isolated, and plaster is applied with a trowel. As Long paints this section, the damp wall absorbs the pigment. A chemical reaction between the water-based pigment and lime in the plaster locks the color particles into place, creating a hard calcium carbonate skin. The image literally becomes the wall.

Occasionally, the surface to receive the paint must be dampened with a fine spray of distilled water to ensure pigment absorption. Every brush stroke becomes immediately permanent. There is no room for mistakes.

At the end of each session, Bertling cuts a beveled "day line" by trimming excess plaster away while it's still malleable. The next day, Holt will spread new plaster onto the wall, careful to "marry" the fresh intonaco to the previous line.

The team, which has scheduled about three weeks for the painting process, is about two-thirds finished.

Long

Long's grandfather, McKendree Robbins Long, was a portrait artist and Presbyterian minister who studied with Philippe De Laszlo, an English court painter.

"I always loved Grandfather's paintings," Long says.

The grandson eventually discovered that the famed Art Students League was still an active teaching institution, where classical painting could be learned, so he packed his bags and left for New York City. He studied anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and painting with Frank Mason.

Then he became a Marine officer, serving two years and three months in Vietnam as a platoon leader and commander of the Combat Art Team. Art remained on his mind, though "it took away any love for camping," Long says.

After Vietnam, he spent eight years in Italy as apprentice to Pietro Annigoni

In the years since his return from war, Long has produced award-winning, collectible work, as well as many frescoes. His Asheville school is a destination for artists who insist on learning representational drawing and painting.

'Through'

Working on a composition based on the 23rd Psalm has been tricky, he says. This short song of David is full of imagery, but artists who try to render the text into a visual expression run the danger of slipping into cliche, he said. Yet, at the same time, the psalm is so familiar, it's difficult to present some new idea.

So Long has focused on a manageable goal: sharing the poetry of the text and "directing energy toward a sense of elevation."

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

"The significant word is 'through,' " Long says. "You didn't know anything in the womb, and all of a sudden you show up. Why not show another passage? Death is inevitable, but why make it grim? It doesn't have to be."

In the fresco there is a man leaning against a rock, reluctant to lift the palm of his hand from the hard surface of the material world. An old woman plays with a young child. A woman drinks from a dish. A chorus of beautiful women reassure the viewer. One of them looks out from the picture at the spectator. A seated man who seems to be meditating or praying gazes into the distant illuminated meadow where shadow figures calmly wander. These two figures help to establish the depth of field, inviting the onlooker to recognize the implied journey and destination inherent in the image.

The viewer moves through space, inside and outside the painting, discovering what it can mean to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902 or aparker@postandcourier.com.