Solon artist Barbara Sullivan literally feels her work. If the plaster is cool to the touch, it’s paintable. Warm, it’s too late.

Fresco is an ancient art form, a process of building up a base with layers of plaster – made with 30-year-old slaked lime – and then painting murals on the plaster while it is still wet. The plaster sucks the paint into it, making the paint and plaster one entity. Know Michelangelo’s paintings at the Sistine Chapel? They’re the world’s most famous frescoes.

But Sullivan, 55, has taken fresco just a few steps further. Far from being flat murals on a wall, her creations are three-dimensional sculptures, most often depicting everyday life and everyday things.

Plaster objects in colorful colors cover her walls, shelves and even stand in the corner. Her workshop is full of bits and pieces of previous installations: a hairbrush, shoes, a toilet, plates, a moose head, a wood stove – all created and painted in plaster. There is a row of day-of-the-week ladies’ underpants, a rooster, a broom and a box of chocolates.

Visitors to the Cross Building at the Maine State Capital might recognize Sullivan’s collection of potatoes, harvesters and lobstermen along the cafeteria’s walls.

Using a spray bottle and plastic wrap to keep her work damp, Sullivan recently prepared for a one-woman show at The Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland. Telling jokes, the always-smiling sculptor moved from one piece to another: painting details on a picnic basket, adding a bit of red to a rocking chair, finishing the border on a shirt.

She laughed when called “the state’s foremost fresco artist.”

“That’s because there aren’t too many people doing it,” she said. In fact, the majority of Maine artists working in fresco have been taught by Sullivan.

An instructor at the University of Maine at Farmington, Sullivan also teaches summer courses at the Arts Center at Kingdom Falls in Belfast, as well as a dozen other places in Maine.

Sullivan’s sly sense of humor shows in her work. In “Messes, Mishaps and Every Day Icons,” Sullivan has created a dress shirt with lipstick on the collar (“That could definitely be a mess,” she said with a laugh.) There is a glass of spilled milk; a pair of wonderful pink shoes slipping on a banana. She calls it “ironic intention” and said she prefers to create common items.

“It is the everyday stuff that binds us all together,” Sullivan said. “I find it very interesting what people have around their homes. It is also about cliche and sarcasm.

“My installations tell and provoke stories about memory and place. Especially about everyday places where we have all spent time, the commonality of our known and similar experiences. As I present the familiar over and over again, I hope my viewer will see himself or herself as a voyeur, eavesdropping with humor and irony on themselves.”

Sullivan said her interest in everyday lives might have started when she was a child and accompanied her physician father on house calls in the Bingham area. “I talked a lot and mom would tell him, ‘Take her with you.'”

One of nine children, Sullivan also used to pull a lamp into her closet for privacy and spend hours creating objects and painting her closet walls.

She has a master’s in fine arts from Vermont College and has traveled extensively in Europe and Ireland, researching her art form.

Sullivan has worked in oils and as a silversmith, owns her own wreath businesses, built her home and studio (including the chimneys and fireplaces herself) and painted sets for Lakewood Theater. But it was in 1990, while working as a cook at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, that she discovered fresco.

“It was so challenging, to take such a heavy medium and make it look light,” she said. “It is very unforgiving. You must paint from light to dark and you have such a small window of time in which to work.”

“I’m a very direct painter,” she said. “Either it comes off or it fails.”

Using the wall as a ground, Sullivan first creates a wooden model and then builds up the shapes with other bits of wood. The entire piece is covered in metal lathe and then a first coat of rough plaster, which is followed by the second, final coat. While wet, the paint, created by grinding pigments into lime water, is applied.

Evidence of this ancient art form dates back to the second millennium B.C., and artists continued to paint frescoes through the Greek, Roman and Byzantine empires.

After the Renaissance, the fresco’s popularity declined, but was revived in the 20th century by the Mexican painters Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco, and David Siqueiros when they used fresco techniques for their murals. Under the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s Depression, many American artists such as Thomas Hart Benton produced fresco murals as well. Today, frescoes are no longer widely used because of to their susceptibility to humidity and weathering.

Barbara Sullivan’s show “Interiors: Messes, Mishaps and Every Day Icons” runs through July 16 at The Caldbeck Gallery, 12 Elm Street, Rockland. For more information, call 594-5935 or visit www.caldbeck.com.