Contents
Robert
Barnum is painting the sky at the point where it begins to lighten into
dawn. To do this he stands on a wooden hand-made scaffolding-on-wheels
cushioned with bits of foam rubber so it doesn’t rip the 140-foot
long, 12-foot tall canvas lining the walls of a defunct handball court
in the basement of the Alumni Building.
When the
time comes to paint the final section of the mural, he’ll have to
build a temporary freestanding wall down the middle of the court so he
can stretch the rest of the canvas. “When you’re painting something
this big, there are no books on how to do it,” Barnum says. “You
have to figure it out for yourself.”
The University’s
resident artist has a few more months before he has to figure out just
how he’s going to get the 400-pound canvas out of the court, across
campus and affixed to the wall. “It might involve removing a few
bricks,” he says, squeezing paint onto his pallet from one of the
hundred or more tubes he’ll go through before he’s done.
Putting
the Pieces Together
The mural
is an allegory (“Really, more like a puzzle,” Barnum says) about
the history of ideas and the generation of knowledge.
The painting
begins with a female figure leaning against a cave where three smaller
figures are huddled around a fire. A large male figure pays homage to
the early African civilizations, and the sweep of his left arm graphically
ties together images representing the rise of both written language and
religion. A later section juxtaposes children at play and instruments
of war—a recognition that knowledge is pushed forward both by innocent
curiosity, and more perilously, by conflict.
The final
image is a Rube Goldberg-like machine with an automobile’s front-end
whose body is composed of gears, satellite dishes, a curved ladder suggesting
the DNA spiral, a computer monitor, telephone receiver and fun-house style
shift lever. “We always want a kind of Star Trek vision of the future,
where there’s a warm, glowing light emanating Charlton Heston’s
voice,” Barnum observes. “The mural suggests that knowledge
itself is neither good nor bad, but rather is whatever we make of it.”
The Big
Picture
The mid-point
of the mural is a huge, 20-foot long figure of a woman in classic Greek
gown, a figure often used to portray liberty or justice. The woman anchored
the preliminary sketches for Barnum, who worked outwards from the figure
in sketchbooks he compares to the “flip books” that children
draw. If it was difficult to envision the whole work in sketchbooks, it
will be increasingly hard as the actual painting grows and the time from
conception to completion lengthens.
Beginning
just before dawn and ending at night, the mural’s “action”
takes place in a single day, although the process of its creation will
take a bit longer. Because of his teaching load and the scope of the project,
Barnum thinks the mural might not be completed and installed until fall
of 2003.
When finished,
the painting will grace the long, serpentine wall of FLITE’s Extended
Learning Center, above windows overlooking the quad. The installation
promises to be even more difficult than his other large painting on canvas,
“The Visionary.” That work, a triptych that hangs in the Arts
and Sciences Building atrium, is 33 feet in length, with a 20-foot tall
main canvas and two 9-by-7 foot side panels. The new work, once completed,
unrolled from a long steel rod (“Sort of like a huge paper towel
dispenser,” as Barnum describes it), and affixed to the wall, will
undulate above early morning meetings, vending machine lunches eaten over
laptops and bleary-eyed all-nighters.
Those
library users are one of the reasons that Barnum is painting on canvas
rather than directly on the wall. Even with an industrial-strength air-purifier
running constantly, the air in his handball court studio is pungent. “The
smell from the varnish would have made the Extended Learning Center, maybe
the whole library, unusable for months at a time,” he says. “And
that simply wasn’t an option.” Also, like the sweep of centuries
his painting encompasses, Barnum is taking the long view. “One roof
leak and a wall painting has to be replaced,” he says. “But
canvas can last for 1,000 years if stored properly. If the painting does
ever sustain damage, it can be taked down and restored.”
Learning
Curve
A painter
of smaller canvases never has to contend with such logistical questions
as whether or not there will be an actual unveiling when the work is finally
installed. “How would you hang and then drop 140 feet of veil?”
Barnum wonders, pondering the moment when the work will finally be made
public.
That’s
just one of the questions that will have to be answered along the way.
It will be two years or more from the time Barnum began stretching the
massive canvas to the day the work is installed on the curved wall of
FLITE. Barnum says he learns something every time he works on a painting.
This time, he’s going to learn a lot. 
