By Taillefer Long
My earliest memories are not of places so much as of the quality of light in them. Florence in the morning. The particular stillness of a church before anyone else has arrived. The smell of plaster and pigment and whatever someone had brought for lunch, laid out on a folding table in the nave while my father worked above us on the scaffolding.
He always had a crew around him. That is the thing I want to tell you about first, before anything else. Fresco is not a solitary pursuit -- technically it cannot be, because the plaster dries quickly and there is always more to do than one person can manage -- but my father's crews were something beyond the practical. They were, in the truest sense, a community of believers. Artists in their own right, each of them serious, each of them accomplished, each of them choosing to be there not because it was the obvious career move but because they believed in what he was doing and in him. They had bought into something. The commitment required, the difficulty of the work, the long days on scaffolding in mountain churches with no heating in January -- none of that deterred them. If anything it seemed to be part of the point. You do not give that kind of effort to something you are not certain matters.
I grew up watching this. We moved -- Florence, Paris, Rome, back to North Carolina, back again -- following the work, following the commissions, following whatever the next wall was. My mother came. My brothers came. The crew came, or a version of them, people joining and departing across the years but the spirit of the thing remaining constant. When the commissions were good and the money was there, we celebrated together, all of us, with the generosity of people who understood that good fortune is for sharing. When things were more difficult -- and there were difficult years, years when the calls did not come and the projects did not materialise -- we were still together, just more quietly, at home, at a smaller table. The togetherness was not conditional on the abundance.
What he was painting, always, was message. The frescoes in the mountain churches of North Carolina -- St. Mary's in West Jefferson, Holy Trinity in Glendale Springs -- are not decorations. They are statements of belief, made in the most permanent medium available, addressed to anyone who walks through the door. My mother is the Virgin Mary on the wall of one of those churches. I am the child in the brown coat in the Bank of America tower in Charlotte, painted by my father into a secular fresco that will be seen by more people in a week than most galleries see in a year. These are not sentimental details. They are evidence of something my father understood deeply: that the work and the life are not separate things. That what you believe, you put into what you make, and what you make outlasts you.
People still come to those churches. They come from far away, many of them, having heard about the frescoes, not quite knowing what to expect, and they stand in front of them and something happens. I have watched this many times. The paintings are not famous in the way that museum works are famous. There is no gift shop, no audio guide, no queue. There is just the image on the wall and the person standing before it, and whatever passes between them in that moment. My father made that possible. His crew made it possible. The communities that said yes -- that believed, against considerable practical evidence, that a small mountain church in North Carolina was a worthy home for a work made in the tradition of Michelangelo -- made it possible.
Illuminated Stories is, among other things, an attempt to honour that. Not to replicate it -- you cannot replicate it -- but to carry something of its spirit forward. The belief that beauty is worth the difficulty. That the people you do the work with matter as much as the work itself. That sharing something of value -- a painting, a place, a table, an evening -- is not a luxury or an add-on to a life well lived. It is, in many ways, the whole point.
My father built things that will outlast all of us. I want to show them to you.