Frescoes
During my first year as an Art History student in the 90s at The Courtauld Inst of Art in London, I encountered the most transformative exhibition, at the Italian Institute of Culture. The exhibit showed whole rooms of Pomepeiin frescoes. I visited it many times, particularly over the British winter, when my southern spirit yearned for warm Mediterranean colours and the visual representation of citrus, sage and lavender scents.
Some of my earliest paintings were so inspired by this concept of il muro, that they were constructed from plaster board, with sections of inserted slate, pink gypsum plaster and paint. They were a weighty fusion of the solid quality of plaster with the fluid aspect of thin washed of paint.
The frescoes, are created deep in a Devon Valley, and reflect the warm earthy tones of the soil and the mineral pigments that are from this landscape.
First the board is coated with a lime based plaster, which I trowel on by hand. Whilst still damp, I paint into the wet plaster, using silicate and lime-based pigments that form a chemical bond with the sub-strate. The paint and surface are enmeshed in a manner unlike any other artistic process, in the way that Pompeiian fresco painters would have done 2000 years before.
The painting is finished over the dry stage, which results in many thin layers being created: an obscuring of some previous marks and revealing others.
