Artist Mark Balma stands on his scissor lift with a fresco behind him inside his art studio in Minneapolis July 19. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
As an artist, Mark Balma is up to big things, but that’s also how he got started, after all: on large pieces of paper from the religious sisters who taught him at Ascension Catholic School in Minneapolis.
They knew the grade-schooler had a talent for art, so sometimes they’d ask him to create something for special occasions, like St. Joseph’s feast day.
For him, the chance to do large-scale drawing was a real treat. “In those days, there were no places to get big pieces of paper” outside his classroom, he said. Once he got a commission from the sisters, “I’d go home and I’d probably work on it over the weekend … and that got me thinking big scale.”
Now, at 64, he’s working on his largest commission yet, both in scale and breadth: A series of frescoes, destined for the walls of a recently restored church, Immaculate Conception in Terni, Italy, about 65 miles south of Rome. He’ll eventually fresco the church’s ceiling, too. It’s not only the size of the commission, but the subject matter that thrills him: women from Scripture, a subject that he says has never been explored on this magnitude.
On scaffolding he built himself, in the second-floor atrium of a Minneapolis office building, hang three 20-by-15-foot frescoes: the beleaguered Hagar, recently cast out by Abraham; Adam and Eve, awash in cosmic color; and an elderly Sarah, standing with Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael, her deeply lined face a stark contrast to her infant son Isaac.
“This is the most interesting subject” he’s ever worked on, Balma said. “It feels just very timely. It feels like I’m really connected with our age right now in this sense.”
The works’ biblical themes touch contemporary issues: immigration, scientific discovery, the role of women in society. For him, the stories don’t feel ancient, but new.
Artist Mark Balma talks about his project painting women from Scripture. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
When Balma accepted the parish’s commission, he never imagined he’d begin it in Uptown. He expected to work directly on the Terni church’s walls, the normal place for fresco. Unlike painting, making frescoes involves a process of mixing pigment with plaster, so the image becomes part of the wall. Balma now lives in Assisi, but was back in the United States last year, gathering supporters and securing funding for the project, when COVID-19 hit Italy, closing, at first, its ports, making it difficult to transfer back some art supplies he had stored in Minneapolis.
When it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to return to Italy in the midst of the pandemic, those stored supplies proved providential. He had what he needed to get started here, however unconventionally: He had to make a fresco that could travel.
Thankfully, Balma’s mentor, fresco artist Pietro Annigoni, who trained him as a young man in Florence, had taught him an ancient but now rarely used technique: frescoing on sailcloth. Using a thin layer of plaster on the flexible surface allows for the works to be rolled up and shipped. It was a method the ancient Greeks used to transport their art as they established outposts around the Mediterranean. Balma had worked with the technique early in his career, and he didn’t want to lose the momentum the project had gained.
“What we can do is create these frescoes here, roll them up and send them there,” he said.
Balma works on a fresco inside his adopted art studio. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
He asked around about studio space large enough for the work, even inquiring about the Cathedral of St. Paul’s basement. (It was unavailable). Then, through a series of connections, he found the MoZaic East building on Lagoon Avenue, with an empty atrium with two levels of natural light. It ended up being the perfect place for Balma to create his frescoes, especially as Minnesota entered its own period of pandemic-related social restrictions. He worked daily, alone with his paint and plaster, using a scissor lift to reach the top of his canvases.
While different than working on site with a team, he has enjoyed it. He keeps in touch via Zoom with parish leaders at Immaculate Conception so they can follow his progress.
Balma plans to finish the three frescoes he began here and ship them to Italy next month. He’ll wait to start the seven others on site, but he’ll stick with the method, painting the frescoes on high-grade cotton muslin to be adhered to the wall.
He hasn’t fully settled on the series’ 10 subjects. He expects to add Ruth and Naomi, an allegorical scene from Song of Songs, the Blessed Virgin Mary with Jesus at the Wedding at Cana, the Woman at the Well, Mary and Martha, and the Last Supper, with women in the Upper Room along with the Apostles.
As he prepared to depict the women of the first three frescoes, he explored Christian, Jewish and Islamic interpretations of Eve, Sarah and Hagar. All three religions include the Book of Genesis — which chronicles those three women’s lives — among their sacred Scriptures. That also speaks to one of the project’s goals — to make art that promotes interfaith dialogue.
“After the works are up there, (the plan is) to invite this ecumenical group of people, writers and theologians, and to discuss and let people explore this,” Balma said. One of the misconceptions he hopes will be addressed is Hagar’s frequent dismissal as only a slave girl. His work intends to acknowledge her as an important figure in her own right, especially in the Islamic tradition.
The art supplies Balma uses for his frescoes. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
Balma expects the 10 panels to take about three years, and then he’ll undertake the church’s ceiling. He’ll paint that as traditional fresco, just as he frescoed the seven cardinal virtues on the atrium ceiling of the Founders Hall on the University of St. Thomas’ Minneapolis campus, finishing in 1995. He also frescoed portraits of some of the university’s supporters.
Balma’s other local commissions include two large frescoes in the Cathedral of St. Paul, as well as work in the Huber Funeral Chapel in Excelsior and the Minnetonka Center for the Arts. He is also a sought-after portrait artist whose subjects in oil include George H. W. Bush, who sat for the work after he left office. The portrait is part of the collection at his presidential library in College Station, Texas.
As a medium, fresco has a luminosity not found in paintings, Balma said, and that’s emphasized by light elements he’s worked into each of the women’s scenes.
“In these frescoes, the thing that will tie them all together is light,” he said, noting that light can be understood both scientifically and spiritually.
Working through his nearly completed panels, Eve, Hagar and Sarah, he said, “You have the light of creation and the beginning of light. Then you’ve got the light of an angel at night, and then you’ve got the light of a bright, sunny day in the desert. … All of these works will be unified by some sort of light.”
Learn more about the series at womenoffaithfrescoes.com.
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