Virginia Precourt, at 92; artist's work was made to last

Virginia Precourt layered polymers with her paint or pastels to increase the life span of each creation. Below, ''Rehearsal Break,'' a painting by Mrs. Precourt. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff/File 2001)

Virginia S. Precourt knew that even though an artist's paintings may survive for centuries, they often deteriorate with time. Desiring a different future for her work, she layered polymers with her paint or pastels to increase the life span of each creation.

"Everything falls apart, and I can't stand that," she told the Globe in 2001. "My art is devoted to finding new methods of permanence, to finding things that won't fall apart. Artists come and go rapidly, and usually their work does, too. I like to think if you're going to put time and effort into something, it should last."

Mrs. Precourt, whose work ranged from portraiture to impressionist paintings, and from graceful, detailed drawings to seemingly indestructible frescoes, died Nov. 22 in her Dover home. She was 92, and her health had failed slowly since suffering a stroke a year ago.

Possessed of an inveterate curiosity, she traveled the world seeking inspiration, sometimes just to find the right color. Even at night, Mrs. Precourt made sure that if inspiration arrived midslumber, she was ready to record her thoughts.

"She kept note cards by her bed, and she would often dream up subjects for her paintings," said Marcia L. Vose, a longtime friend who is director of the Vose Galleries on Newbury Street in Boston, which handles Mrs. Precourt's work. "She would wake up, write them down, and at the end of the month she would go through the ideas and keep the ones that made sense."

A few years ago, Mrs. Precourt gave a talk at the Algonquin Club of Boston and offered insights about the distances she sometimes traveled in pursuit of the right touch.

"She began the lecture by saying she had in her mind a certain kind of blue," said her son Geoffrey of Ashfield. "It wasn't an aqua marine blue, and it wasn't a bird's egg blue. She said she couldn't find it here, but knew she could find it in Greece. She went to Greece and couldn't find it there, but she found it in Egypt. And then a slide came on of a building in Egypt with that color of blue, and the next slide was a painting she did with the same color."

Private by nature, Mrs. Precourt usually kept such anecdotes to herself. "I was there in the second row, and I hadn't heard the story before," her son said. "I was just as thrilled as anyone else."

Born Virginia Strom, she grew up in Duluth, Minn., and was an adolescent when her family moved to Cleveland. By the time she graduated from the private Laurel School in Cleveland in 1934, she already was immersed in art. Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston followed, but with the Great Depression affecting finances, her family summoned her home.

"Two years later, in 1936, I couldn't sell a thing," she told Nancy Jarzombek for a profile in the catalog for one of Mrs. Precourt's shows at the Vose Galleries. "My parents declared enough was enough and either I come home or try earning my own living for a change."

She did both, returning to Cleveland and working as a freelance commercial artist.

"That experience taught me the importance of disciplined productivity," Mrs. Precourt recalled in the catalog profile.

While working in Cleveland, she met Harry A. Precourt, whom she married in 1941. Six years later, they moved to the Boston area, where he was New England manager of Fortune magazine. They lived in Wellesley and moved to Dover in 1962.

By the early 1950s, she had begun to step away from commercial art and return to the imaginative approaches she had set aside years earlier. Then she was diagnosed with cancer in 1958, which later went into remission. While recuperating in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where the Precourts had a vacation home, she started experimenting with polymers and adhesives to create frescoes more durable than the ones she had seen on trips to Europe to study art restoration.

First she ground granite rocks into dust, then combined the powder with pigments and polyvinyl acetate. The layers of paint resulted in something she called a polyfresco, a work of art ready to last forever.

"She even buried one for two years, then dug it up again," Vose said with a laugh. "And it was fine."

Similarly, Mrs. Precourt made pastels more durable.

"She would build up her pastels in layers, five or six layers," Vose said. "In between each layer she would put liquid polymer, which is virtually indestructible, as a binder to adhere. By doing that, she achieved a tapestry effect. There was a lot of texture to her pastels which you don't ordinarily see."

Vose added: "I think what she was after was permanence - there's no flaking on her pastels. And she painted on Baltic birch, not canvas, so they're meant to last."

Ranging as widely as her styles, Mrs. Precourt's subjects included a series of ballerinas and a rendering of outer space.

"Underneath all of this was her ability to draw," Vose said. "She didn't put anything to paper without first sketching it out thoroughly."

Even though her own work found its way into private and museum collections, Mrs. Precourt was generous while encouraging even the slightest artistic efforts.

When her sons brought friends home and one would show Mrs. Precourt a fledgling drawing, she might hang it on the wall next to her own painting and shrug off suggestions that the two didn't belong side by side.

"She would say: 'Who's to say it's not art? It's somebody's expression of their soul, and that's fine,' " her son said.

In addition to her son Geoffrey, Mrs. Precourt leaves another son, Harry S. of New York City, and a sister, Harriet Hoover of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

A memorial gathering will be held in January.