The Art of Fresco Painting
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Christiana Ciolac

Hubert Massey Video

Meet a local artist who is bringing back the ancient art of fresco painting, one tedious stroke at a time.

It has traveled the centuries well. From the days of the pharaohs to the Detroit Athletic Club, the exquisite art of true fresco, the tedious process of applying specially prepared pigments on nearly wet plaster, the art of the ancients, of Michaelangelo, of Rivera and the chosen personal expression of Hubert Massey.

"It's tedious. It's time consuming, but the experience, to me, is wonderful," Massey said.

Some months ago, members of the prestigious Detroit Athletic Club determined that the aging city landmark needed a little sprucing up. The arches in the grill room covered what once had served as the kitchen.

Well, now they've been transformed for the future, holding the first major frescos to be commissioned in the city since the famous Rivera murals were completed at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

"This is the medium where artists can really test their skills and their abilities and there is no room for error."

The renaissance man behind this renaissance of fresco is Hubert Massey, a native of Flint Beecher High School who found that his love of fine art had actually stolen his heart at a very young age. Although it was a football scholarship that had propelled him into college at Grand Valley State, it was his discovery of the marriage between art and architecture that would lead him to his very personal playing field.

"Art is always a merge with architectural structure and it brings a sense of humanity, a human element. It's not that architecture doesn't have human elements, but having that together, that creativeness and the structural items, is just a real nice blend," Massey explained.

Like his famed predecessor in fresco, Diego Rivera, Hubert Massey, too, spent a spell as a sign painter, about 12 years painting giant billboards served to apprentice him in thinking and creating large.

"We did billboards that were 14 feet by 48 feet. I painted a face 30 feet by 25 feet in a day, in oils. It was just a great experience," he said.

Fresco is painful, tedious, demanding and all too precise for some. From scale drawings to hand ground paint pigments to five coats of plaster to tracings, transfers and, finally, to the brush that must move so quickly over the drying plaster. It is an organic line dance.

The lime and the plaster react with carbon monoxide in the air and swiftly bind the pigments that will eventually deepen, darken, and clarify with the passing of time. It is work that with only modest care will survive another millennium.

Hubert Massey: "It makes me feel real good inside, to be able to bring ideas to the front and watch the materialization and development into something more physical and concrete."

To many in the art word, fresco is all but a lost art. in the tech no age few have the time or the patience for it anymore. Only a very few true fresco artists actually exist in the US one of them, of course, is hubert massey. The big man, whose heart is cast in wet plaster, who dreams large dreams of empty spaces waiting to be filled, dreams cast in wet, muted colors, colors that will forever mirror the beauty of his pains taking work.

"It makes me feel like I'm part of the puzzle of a big picture."

You know that's going to be there as long as this building.

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