Inspired by Rome and influenced by abstractionists, New Mexico artist Marcia Myers has collectors clamoring for her own ageless works of art

Years ago, on the days when she wasn't teaching art history at the prestigious Madeira School for Girls in McLean, Virginia, 24-year-old Marcia Myers hopped on her bicycle and pedaled to one of downtown Washington's seedier neighborhoods where she and a group of other young artists worked out of a cramped studio above a busy porn shop. Unpacking her brushes and paints, she set to work on whatever canvas happened to be on her easel, concentrating intently on turning out still another work in the time-honored form of Vermeer or Titian.

"At that time, I still was doing figurative work in oil glaze. You could actually recognize my subjects," she laughs, tossing her head, her blonde ponytail bobbing.

That was long before her philosophy of art did a flip-flop; before she forged beyond the conventional training she had absorbed in classes at a half dozen schools over a thirteen-year period; before she began a decade-long series of daring experiments in technique and style that have, today, made her the country's preeminent fresco painter, an artist whose work is in demand by gallery owners, collectors, museums, and corporations from Ireland to Idaho, Canada to South America; an artist whose paintings, when they are available, are snapped up for upwards of $10,000 each.

It has been a great leap for Myers, who never expected to actually sell her work, much less be celebrated, who, in fact, never showed professionally until 1982 when she was 33. But Myers's goals have never been fame or fortune. From the time she was a child in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when her mother gave her a jumbo-sized box of crayons and told her to amuse herself, Myers, 48, has been obsessed only with art for art's sake. "I just love painting," she says almost shyly. "I'm addicted to it. That's why I sometimes spend ten hours a day, seven days a week, in the studio."

A rambling suite of rooms in a white-walled building with a red tile roof, Myers's studio is only a two-minute walk from the house she shares with her husband, an international investment banker-turned-cattleman, on their 27,000-acre ranch near the community of Corona in east central New Mexico, on the fringe of Peter Hurd country.

Her frescoes in progress -- the large Scavis, the slightly smaller Frammentos, the narrow Predellas and the square Quadratis -- are hanging on the walls, singly or in groups, or propped against the flat-surfaced work tables that look immense enough to double as helipads. A show at the Allene LaPides Gallery in Santa Fe is imminent, and will be quickly followed by another at the Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley, so the studio is brimming with newly finished material in a spectrum of color.

Color, in fact, is the single most important facet of Myers's concept and an integral part of her technique, one which she has spent more than a decade perfecting.

After a classical education that formally began at the Philadelphia School of Art, Myers progressed through a special Syracuse University program in Florence, Italy, and the B.A. curriculum at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. From there, she went to George Washington University for post-graduate work. Soon after earning her M.F.A. degree she was on a trip to Pompeii and Herculaneum with a group of her Madeira students when she was first exposed to the full force of the Italian fresco.

While it would be a dozen years before she succumbed to the seductive power of the technique perfected by the likes of Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Raphael, the sight of those walls buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. stayed with her, buried in her subconscious. Even while she continued to focus on the conventional skills, working in oil glaze on canvas, she commuted to southern Italy on a regular basis as if drawn by an invisible and irresistible force.

In the early Eighties, some seven years after the planting of the fresco seed, she began her transition. Working in her Georgetown studio (six years before her move to New Mexico), the first step was Myers's change from figurative to abstract imagery. Notably, the paintings were done on stretched linen rather than canvas, an adjustment that would later prove enormously consequential. The alterations were sufficient to earn her a show -- her first -- at the Adams-Middleton Gallery in Dallas.

But the innovations were just beginning; by this time Myers also was beginning to experiment with frescoes. Three years later, she had her first exhibit of the style that would later make her famous.

When Lisa Kurts saw Myers's frescoes at the Adams-Middleton in 1985 she asked the artist for a group of paintings to show at her Memphis gallery. Since then, Myers has exhibited five times with Kurts. During the thirteen years Kurts has been showing Myers's work, she has sold some two hundred of her paintings to collectors in Europe, South America, and across the United States. She also keeps a waiting list of more than a hundred others who would like to own one of Myers's paintings.

Gail Severn tells a similar tale. In the two years she has been showing Myers's work, she can't keep her frescoes from running out the door of her Sun Valley gallery. The first group of Myers's frescoes she exhibited, some eighteen to twenty-two paintings, sold out almost overnight. "We went back and asked her for more and she sent us as many as she could, which also sold out. It was the first time in the eighteen years I've had the gallery that we sold out a show plus everything else the artist sent us."

Much of what makes the New Mexico artist's work so sought-after, Kurts and Severn agree, is Myers's sense of color and texture.

"One of the things that attracted me to Marcia was how luscious and beautiful her surfaces are," says Severn. "That and her incredible grasp of color."

Kurts, who keeps several of Myers's frescoes in her personal collection, uses more earthy terms. "Her paintings are seductive," she says. "They're sensuous from a color and textual standpoint as well as being quite engaging visually."

Myers, however, did not reach her current form overnight; it took her a decade of experimentation with media and colors to get to the point where she is now.

Rejecting the traditional foundation for the fresco (wet plaster) out of hand because it was too heavy, Myers first tried paper. When that failed to give her the results she was looking for she tried other foundations, eventually settling on stretched linen.

While she was tinkering with various foundations, she discovered, almost by accident, a small German company that sold colored earth from southern Italy, the cradle of the fresco. "Isn't it beautiful," she exclaims, opening a jar and spreading a sample of the contents on her palm, a bright orange clay sifted as fine as talcum. "It's called Terra Pozzuoli " she says, pointing out a couple of her other favorites: Terra Ercolano and Pompeii Red.

Eventually, she settled on a formula for media and pigment that made her happy. As she explains it, it is relatively simple.

Instead of the traditional plaster, she uses a mixture of marble dust and clear acrylic varnish. This medium gives her something that is lacking in traditional plaster: a special luminance that is a trademark of her paintings. The incandescent effect is heightened because the medium has proved especially receptive to the German dyes that Myers prefers. The result is a painting that seems to glow from within, one that looks remarkably like the ancient Italian frescoes yet is hangable because the stretched linen foundation is not onerously heavy.

"Myers has taken an historical technique and come up with a modern way of doing it," says Severn. "She has been able to research and develop a technique so it is archival yet lightweight."

However, the process puts stress on Myers that the ancients did not face. Since the pigment must be added while the medium is tractable (unlike murals which are painted onto the surface and can fade or flake off, the colors in frescoes are permanently fixed into the surface) she has only a short time to work.

Once she is satisfied with the color intensity and gradation, she affixes dried detritus of earlier paintings for contrast and depth. Then, when the medium begins to harden, she covers it and puts it aside for a about a week to set up. While it is aging, she works on other sections, which will ultimately result in a diptych or triptych format.

That is what Myers calls Phase One. The next step, Phase Two, is more delicate, involving aesthetic judgments relating to scale, proportion, color, and surface. If Myers is not satisfied with one or more of the sections, she commonly "recycles" the original, starting all over by applying an new coat of marble dust and varnish. Often she is amazed at the result seen in the recycled paintings since the original frequently imparts a "ghost image" that adds character. The Romans, she says, often did this, renewing their frescoed walls like modern home keepers change wallpaper.

Myers confesses that her work has been heavily influenced by abstractionists like Mark Rothko and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Kurts, for one, finds the similarities astonishing.

"There is a common denominator in color and structure, especially between Myers and Rothko," she says. "Their paintings really engage the viewer in a very conscious way."

Unlike many abstractionists, though, Myers denies that her paintings contain a message. "They aren't Rorschach tests," she chuckles, adding that they are meant to be enjoyed for their color, form, and texture, not because of any possible subliminal communication. "They're about paint and painting. That's all."