Modern Frescoes

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Photo by Lynn Sweet

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Artist Lynn Sweet's frescoes require a painstaking process and roughly 60 to 100 hours of work for each painting. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Artist Lynn Sweet's frescoes require a painstaking process and roughly 60 to 100 hours of work for each painting. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

Gazing at Lexington artist Lynn Sweet’s polished, sophisticated fresco landscapes and floral studies, you’d be hard-pressed to imagine the secret to his style comes from the cake decorating aisle.

“For years, I was applying my colors with a palette knife, and it was abstract sort of things, nominally landscapes,” said Sweet, a longtime staff instructor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Art & Visual Studies. “But then my friend and neighbor Debbie McKnight, an artist who works in cake, brought me a cake-decorating bag. And immediately I started using that to apply the colors, using the different size [piping bag] tips.”

The application change, which he adopted roughly seven years ago, allowed the artist to transition from his previous abstract, representational paintings to more realistic landscapes that reflect vistas around Central Kentucky — and elsewhere — that inspire him.

Sweet’s newest collection of roughly 20 frescoes filled with bright, inviting images of tree-lined lanes, vineyards just before harvest and blossoms at their peak, will be on display at New Editions Gallery beginning this month, marking the artist’s first solo show there in four years.

“Lynn is a master craftsman of the highest level in everything he does,” said New Editions Gallery owner Frankie York, who has known Sweet since the early 1980s. “His dedication to detail is just extraordinary. I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody who puts as much effort into their art as he does.”

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Sweet works in a basement studio in his Kenwick home to create his frescoes. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet works in a basement studio in his Kenwick home to create his frescoes. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet works in a basement studio in his Kenwick home to create his frescoes. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet is also an accomplished woodworker building custom bookshelves, desks and consoles. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet is also an accomplished woodworker building custom bookshelves, desks and consoles. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet is also an accomplished woodworker building custom bookshelves, desks and consoles. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

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Sweet is also an accomplished woodworker building custom bookshelves, desks and consoles. Photo by Emily Giancarlo and Bradley Quinn

Meticulous and inspired

Sweet’s painting process is extraordinarily time-intensive. First, he creates a colored plaster using earth pigments (formed from naturally occurring minerals and oxides) that are mixed with marble dust and bound by an acrylic polymer. He then applies the pigmented plaster one color at a time to a quarter-inch plywood panel. After waiting for each new layer to dry, he sands it to perfect smoothness before adding the next pigment.

Sweet describes the approach as a “polymer masonry process,” since he applies the pigmented plaster directly to the wood panel, piping on one bead of a particular pigment at each step. The term “fresco” referred to painting with watercolor pigments on wet lime plaster (Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is a famous example), but Sweet’s approach to frescoes is distinguished by his use of pigment in the plaster rather than on it.

When completed — thanks to intensive sanding using fine-grit, automotive-grade sandpaper after the application of each color — his frescoes have a glossy, almost glasslike finish that, nonetheless, conveys the feeling of great texture and depth.

“I put all the red down, for example, and then once it’s dry, I sand it down from about five millimeters to around three millimeters, so it’s also an eroded process as well,” Sweet explained.

Sweet – who, in addition to his frescoes, is also well-known for his distinctive, handcrafted Neo-Modern wood furniture – views his technique as being creatively linked to the work of woodblock print artists, who also create their works using one color at a time.

“A great deal of inspiration I get is from woodblock printers including Gustave Baumann, Frances Gearhart, William S. Rice, and more recently Leon Loughridge,” he said.

Sweet tries to spend at least two to three hours a day in his home studio, working around his duties at the University of Kentucky. He estimates that each fresco takes him roughly 60 to 100 hours to complete.

But before beginning each work, Sweet first spends an additional 10 to 20 hours sketching and creating small-scale watercolor studies of his vision in a sketchbook. He then pencil sketches it in full scale on the plywood frame before beginning the laborious process of adding the pigmented plaster. When creating the final work, he typically begins in the foreground and works backward, often adding the blue skies of his images as the final step.

For Sweet, a lifelong artist who spent his early childhood near Detroit before moving to Kentucky when he was 11, inspiration comes from everywhere. Sometimes, it’s in the bloom of a garden flower at Ashland: The Henry Clay Estate, just a short walk from his home.

Other times, a motorcycle ride through the rolling Central Kentucky landscape is his muse. He admits to often stopping his bike by the side of the road to snap photos for later creative use. One such vista, along the South Fork of the Licking River off Highway 36 between Williamstown and Cynthiana, will be on display at the exhibition.

Occasionally, Sweet even paints landscapes he’s never visited in person. Several of the canvases at the upcoming show depict studies of a Portuguese vineyard, based on vacation photos provided by a friend.

As a sort of signature element to Sweet’s work, each of his frescoes wrap around and continue even onto the edges of their wooden, plywood frames, giving his works a three-dimensional effect that he enjoys.

“When you hang it on the wall, someone can walk into the room and they might only see this long thin picture from the side,” Sweet said. “And then as they approach the work, they go from this oblique angle to a more [direct view] at the front of the piece, which is the normal position to view a painting. But that whole time they are engaged.”

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