More About LYNN SWEET FURNITURE In 1970, I began working for Charles W Kelly in his high-end Woodford County antique shop. While there, he taught me how to make exacting copies of late 17th and early 18th century furniture--largely English chairs. I would dismantle the often badly distressed originals, make mechanical drawings of their parts, copy them in his wood shop then repair and reassemble the originals. He would then sell them in his beautifully restored early 19th century family saltbox cottage on his property and I am grateful to those that helped me start. In 1973, I began work in Frankfort on the Old State Capitol Restoration Project, where as a museum technician, I restored furniture and built museum installations. There, I continued to copy antique chairs but also to design chairs that were largely reminiscent of the old forms. After leaving the Historical Society, I spent a short time building commissioned furniture and Theil Audio cabinets with a group of friends in Frankfort. In 1982, I accepted a position in the University of Kentucky Art Department (now the School of Art/Visual Studies), running the wood shop and giving wood shop safety orientations to 5000 students over 40 years. I also taught Fine Arts Institute Woodworking Joinery classes that I continue to this day. During this time, surrounded by a great set of artists and new inspirations, my work took on very different directions. I made a large body of furniture pieces that have used advanced techniques and a wide array of materials that have come a long way from the antiques that informed my initial inquiries. Influenced initially by turn of the 19th century furniture and jewelry, the Memphis design movement and later by neoclassical and neomodern furniture and architectural aesthetics, these playful and inventive influences have informed my design/build forms ever since as I've explored bent lamination, veneering approaches and material manipulation techniques. ACRYLIC TUBE AND BRUSH PAINTING After working for 15 years with my acrylic fresco technique to my mounting satisfaction, it became clear to me that the manipulation of the plaster and 45 years of woodworking were the final insults to my poor, overused thumbs. After a couple of surgeries to correct the injuries to my thumbs, I realized I'd have to come up with another process. The cartoons that I had painted to assure the composition and coloration of my frescoes were done with gouache paint. This gave me some hope that I could paint with acrylic. Though I had painted everything from bicycles and model cars to watercolor cartoons for furniture clients and eventually to furniture parts themselves, it had been decades since I had taken a painting class. But my initial attempts to paint with acrylics convinced me that I was better equipped for this technique than I feared, and I've enjoyed a considerable success painting the landscapes of rural Kentucky and beyond. Works in this Gallery are acrylic or fresco as noted on wall tags. FRESCOES When one thinks of fresco, the Renaissance works of masters such as Michelangelo and Raphael spring to mind. Their work utilized the Buon Fresco technique where an area to be painted that day, a 'giornato', or day's work, was coated with a fine layer of lime plaster. Earth pigments and oxides were mixed with water and applied to the wet plaster. An indispensable component of this process is the carbonation of the lime which fixes the pigment IN the plaster, not ON it. My process is quite different from that of the Buon Fresco process. For years I was inspired by Marcia Myers work that her studies of Pompeian frescoes had led to exhibits in Santa Fe, NM. By observing her work and looking into her techniques, I put together a concoction of material that resembles her own. As opposed to Michelangelo and Raphael's Buon fresco process, I mixed marble dust, earth pigments and oxides with acrylic artist medium. when the acrylic coalesced, the colorants were locked IN the plaster, again, not On it. Initially, while I was learning to mix and use this recipe, I would use pallet knives to apply one color at a time and then erode the excess, exposing the upper levels of the lower layers with automotive wet sandpaper and rubber sanding blocks. In 2012, I was awarded a commission to paint five fresco panels to hang in the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center, Pavilion. At this point I decided to try my hand at representational landscape and this has been my concentration ever since. Using the same concoction of plaster, this time I used a Wilton Bag (cake decorating bag) to apply one color at a time to a panel. After a color or two had dried (the acrylic had coalesced), I would flatten the cords of plaster with the wet sandpaper and rubber block. In time, all the colors described in my preliminary studies (cartoons) would affect the final image. The following two pieces illustrate the fresco process in progress. The third piece, and other pieces in the Gallery, are examples of finished fresco works.