- [Classical music]
- 00:05 – Roger Nelson: Scratch code is called the scratch code because you literally do score the surface of it so that the next one will hang on to it and will adhere itself. The rizzo would be the same as the brown coat. And the reason its has a term brown coat to it is because it has more sand than the final coat. And so it appears brown in comparison to the whiteness of the final coat.
- 00:31 – Roger Nelson: The mixing of the lime itself is the very is the most volatile of the of the moments in fresco. Its where you take the powdered lime and you change it into a liquid. And at that point it gets really hot. It gets up to about 400 degrees at the first when you first apply the water and then soon after that about a minute or two after it starts cooling off. So you have to uh approach it more like a chemist than an artist. You have to make sure that all your skin is covered and everything because it’s very hot. So where the term hot lime comes from.
- 01:11 – Unknown Speaker: In the decision making process after the composition has been sort of locked in place, you then bring your models in and you you work with your studies and you may do several variations of the same portrait, same pose, whatever it might be. And and this is sort of a note taking. From there you then go to the large scale cartoon which that will provide you the actual scaled information that you do need when it comes to the painting of the fresco and its from that that I do the tracing that then gets it onto the wall. So prior to um an artist painting um you know whatever piece uh on the wall, you may have drawn that portrait God knows how many times. I mean you might want to try it in different mediums. If you notice there’s several of the portraits that Ben has done variations of, you know, might be in pencil, might be in sanguine, charcoal, whatever it might be. But then again on the final cartoon and some of them hes also done oil color studies.
- 02:06 – Unknown Speaker: You take a gauze or little uh strips of gauze and and put in powder pigment, in this case a red iron oxide, and that is then pounced against the wall and leaves a dotted image on the wall and we basically then follow the dotted lines very much like you used to do when you were children. We still do it except we don’t have them numbered anymore. This is called the sinopia drawing by the way. It serves a twofold purpose. It shows us what the composition looks like on the wall itself and also it helps the mason each day as he’s laying the plaster, so he knows where to lay the plaster because fresco is painted in sections very much like a jigsaw puzzle.
- 02:41 – Roger Nelson: Basically it’s like a puzzle of a sort. You have to start its a puzzle that you have to start at the top and work to the bottom somehow or another. You have to start at the top because the moisture runs down because plaster spills downward and paint drips downward and everything goes downward. So your best bet is to to plan your whole picture from the top to the bottom.
- 03:06 – Unknown Speaker: Hes now laying that compitura on, the unifying color. Thats done with a large flat brush and done very thinly once the plaster has set up and it is ready to accept paint.
- 03:16 – Unknown Speaker: Then the tracing is again laid back on top of the fresh plaster because obviously by covering up the sinopia, which is the red drawing you see underneath, weve lost our drawing. So we have all of our reference points that we keep that we can lay that tracing back up and we repeat that same procedure we had done earlier to get the sinopia up.
- 03:35 – Unknown Speaker: We use all of the finest colors whether we buy them in France, Italy, we bring them back. We we do find some here that are either clays or minerals.
- 03:43 – Unknown Speaker: When you make the color, you begin with um a powdered pigment. You will add water to it and you will grind that up with a knife and then uh you mix that up very well and then if you need to, you can take a muller which is a glass grinding instrument and grind the color down to a a fine form so that you dont have any any grittiness in it and the color is is well mixed with the water. You use that as as your basis to start mixing up the the actual tones that will go into the fresco.
- 04:16 – Unknown Speaker: You can see there are different types of brushes ranging from the small watercolor fine sable brush to larger round ones to flat ones and then believe me there are many many more but this gives you an idea of some of the brushes. Then the different palette knives used for mixing the paint or cutting the day line at the end of the day and then sponges, whether it be the natural sponge which is used for either applying color in some cases or actually softening edges and of course it’s your regular cleanup sponge.
- 04:44 – Unknown Speaker: When a layer of lime is put up for the day’s work, it its sort of a part of a tortoise shell and it has a an attitude of its own. The water leaves the front of the wall goes to the back of the wall and spreads out to the to the perimeter of of that section. So when in the beginning the plaster is wet and soft, the pigment tends to sit on the surface for a few seconds and then go in and you can watch this magic as the painting portion for that day proceeds towards its critical mass, he has to paint faster. The water on the brush is absorbed instantaneously.
- 05:29 – Roger Nelson: A day mark line is the most critical in doing the plaster. It’s where the one day meets the next day and you can’t cross the plaster onto the painted surface and yet you want to get the plaster right up next to the painted surface. Then the tracing is laid again.
- 05:53 – Unknown Speaker: So at the end of the day, I come in and I trim and I double away from it. So you can see that it’s at about a 45 degree angle. So that’s the very end of the day’s work is cutting that. We usually lay 8 to 10 inches of excess plaster each day so we can control the drying time. Because if we laid plaster just to the edge we were going to paint, obviously, that would dry much center than what’s happening in the day mark or the giornata as its called.
- 06:36 – Unknown Speaker: Looking at one of the single figures close up, you actually see the pits and the surface, the texture of the fresco wall and you can see the brush hit the plaster and the water be absorbed and the pigment literally being left, watching the painting go in the transitions of value and color shift that Ben does that is required of fresco. What you’re literally doing is building up a sandwich of color so that the last color that’s most obvious is sitting on the very surface and you have layers of of reflected light coming up through. The very first thing is to fill in the blanks or draw it in. So Ben is using a color that’s referred to as verdaccio, which is sort of an earthy green made in central Italy that we use for the darker lines and shadows underneath all the color. Then from there, you can see that the rough drawing is pretty much in. What he does is he puts in all the lights. All of your lights are put in at the very beginning of the painting, because the white is going to come in quite strong. So what we try to do throughout the course of the day is to control to keep the lime in the piece itself because it’s going to dry much lighter. So all of the modeling happens at the very beginning. You could even refer to it right here, but it’s your [unintelligible] underpainting, which means light and dark underpainting.
- 07:36 – Roger Nelson: The mother. Uh we ripped her out three times. First time he crossed a green that he thought was the French terraverde which is green earth over the top of the shadow color. A lot of times when youre painting flesh tones you cross over reds over greens to create these these gray tones that are in flesh colors and you you turn the edge. Thats how you turn the edge in fresco. So its commonly done. But this time it came up more of a milky white. And he made mention that she had too stern a look on her face. The first face could’ve stayed there and held up to anybody else’s face in anyone else’s fresco. But Ben wasn’t happy with it, and we’ve kinda made it an unspoken rule that if there’s a doubt then we cut it out. It’s always proved in the long run to be the best way to deal with it, because later on, we’ll look at it and we’ll realize that we should’ve cut it out. And it’s only another day. It’s not a disaster, it’s simply another day. Well, the second day was worse, because he didn’t like the character in the face, and the colors weren’t working properly at all. The third day, we did it, I think the wall finally got oversaturated and tired of taking on plaster in the same spot. It was tired and overworked. That was also a Friday. So it was ripped out. Your energy level, you have to remember that your energy level has to be up for twelve hours of constant painting, no matter what section you’re taking on. And this happened to be the first major figure in the fresco. In other words, the figure that’s in the light and prominent in the story. So we cut it out a third time. We took a relief from the mother and went on to the child in the painting, and set that up. And that was a good move, because that was a dry area that was ready to be frescoed, and the colors were set and it went like a charm. So there was a step back to give the mother a little bit of relief, and then back to the mother. And so finally, on the fourth try, the mother came in and the mother came in quite well.
- [Classical music]
- 09:00 – Unknown Speaker: There’s a point called the golden hour, where you start laying the cross-hatching, the brush strokes, into the wall. And you see them going in, and it’s like lightning bolts flashing into the wall. And that’s the most beautiful time of the day to work, because you’re really moving so quickly at that point. You build up for two, three, four hours to get your painting ready to that point. And then, bam, you’re right there. And it pulls you right through, and you lose total track of time. And hopefully things are pretty close to being finished when it starts to slowly shut down at that point.
- 10:38 – Unknown Speaker: One needs to be humble in front of the Word. You need to be in awe of what’s in front of you. You need to attempt to describe it. And it also is a pursuit of things that are beautiful that you know are beautiful or that you sense are beautiful and you attempt to in some way capture that feeling, that sensation.
The campus is on a two-hour delay today due to inclement weather.