When the weather turns warm, Guntis Apse plans to spend weeks staring up at the sky.

He has spent the last two years of his life planning this moment.

With his back arched and neck bent, his paintbrush will leave his mark as an artist that may last a half-century.

But he is not looking into the clouds for inspiration, he's looking to give theater goers in Baraboo a chance to relive a moment in 1915 - when people walked into the Al. Ringling Theatre for the first time and saw the painted sky.

Apse is restoring a painted ceiling decorated with cherubs that rests high above the entryway of the theater. It's part of the ongoing restoration to return the theater to its original look.

"It was a production piece in its time, probably a number of artists worked on it," Apse said of the painted ceiling. "Back then, that stuff would just walk out of their studios."

Apse plans to paint the ceiling in somewhat the same way Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel - not on his back, but bending backward on scaffolding.

"And I'm using large brushes. It actually goes pretty quick," he said.

The restoration of the oval-shapped lobby is taking place because of a new concession area - which opened Friday to the right of the original theater entrance. Concessions had been sold in the original oval lobby for about 50 years, but were not part of the theater when it was owned by the Ringlings.

"The Ringling family never allowed food or drink in their theater," said Bryant Hazard, president of Al. Ringling Theatre Friends.

The new concession area for patrons allows Apse more space to set up his scaffolding to restore the ceiling's 20-by-12-foot painting, which consists of a sky filled with nine cherubs, one for each Ringling sibling.

"There is one daughter with long hair, and one sleeping in the arms of the daughter, Hazard said, adding that the sleeping sibling represents an infant's death.

Peeling back time

It was Apse who contacted the theater about the restoration of the painted ceiling, and he said he didn't do it for cash considerations, but as a chance to show the community his work.

"It's the coolest job in Baraboo," he said.

When he started the process of prepping the surface, Apse was unsure of what he would find.

"I didn't know the exact colors or anything, because that had been painted over, but I knew I could find them through the layers."

Apse found six layers of paint, which he believes was done in two paint jobs. He has gone through each layer, cleaning it with a chemical to try and find the original look.

"The piece even had a seam in it, which means it didn't have a good piece of rag. I took the seam out," he said. "I've got it all prepped out. It's ready to go."

Apse has taken on the theater project in his spare time at his new art studio in Baraboo near the Bravo Center, which he moved into a year ago. His landscape paintings capture this area's beauty and are what he spends much of his time on. He also plans to be part of the Fall Art Tour.

Apse has found himself creating a wide variety of paintings since he graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1977.

He also fell into the world of decorative art, once painting a family in a giant Zeus-like portrait for a ceiling.

"(Murals) are not hard, but you have to know what you're doing. You have to get the scale right. You have to be able to see it small and work it out," he said. "You'll have a few surprises there."

A theatrical palace

The ceiling at the Ringling Theatre is original to the structure, Hazard said. There are black-and-white photos of the lobby when it opened showing the nine cherubs.

C.W. & George Rapp of Chicago originally designed the theater, leading the two brothers to design others across the country, including the shell for the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. The design for the Ringling is said to have derived from the main opera house in the Palace of Versailles.

As time has aged the colors on the lobby's ceiling, Apse said it can be a little bit agonizing creating a palette to restore it. He has seen old photographs of the lobby's ceiling, but is taking a cue from the future restoration of the painted ceiling in the auditorium for his colors.

"The key is working your palette out, because ultimately that is what trips you up. It's not the drawing or the composition, but the palette. Large, it can look different," he said.

"I'm basically going to bounce off what will be in (the auditorium). And I'm going to leave the cherubs intact. I'm going to lightly enhance those to make it work."

The auditorium ceiling was also a sky painting, but it has slowly disappeared over the years.

"We would love to be able to do the paint and plaster (on that)," Hazard said, adding that it would cost about $700,000 for the work.

"Our best approach is to start small and work up to it."

A solid foundation

During the preparation work on the lobby ceiling, Apse said he was sweating bullets on the shape of the plaster beneath the paint.

"What I'm happy about is

the plaster held up. That was my only main concern was taking the paint off and not destroying the foundation," he said.

When the temperature hits 50 degrees outside this spring, Apse plans to start the painting process. Although the building is heated, Apse said a lot of cold air is trapped in the oval dome of the entryway, and paint needs warmer temperatures to adhere.

Before he starts the sky, he will put a shellac over the ceiling to bond the paint. "If you don't do that you're basically trying to put a paint job over dust," he said.

Using large brushes for the work, Apse predicts it will take about a week to paint the sky, and a few more weeks on top of that to enhance the original cherub work.

"I'm going to be gentile with the (cherub) figures. I'm going to enhance them, not repaint them."

In his studio on the corner of East and Water Street, Apse is putting the finishing touches on a model of the painting that also could become a print of the ceiling for the theater to sell.

"I think I did a really good job of nailing it in terms of the color," he said.

Apse said his work could last 30 years on the ceiling before needing any touchup. Or it could be pristine twice as long if there is less of a temperature change in the room. "Because what breaks down paint is expansion and contraction," he said.

When he's finished, Apse will be the first to see what patrons of the theater saw when the doors first opened in November 1915.

"Man, it's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited," he said. "I was looking at it the other day and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, right on.'"