Volunteers clean the scene at Atlanta’s Cyclorama

Every year a team of volunteers arrives at the Cyclorama, Atlanta’s monumental, in-the-round Civil War painting and diorama, to eat a chicken dinner, take a narrated tour of the painting, then roll their sleeves up and start cleaning.

This year, on a chilly November Saturday, about 30 men and women (and a few children) brought plastic gloves, buckets, hand brooms, feather dusters, vacuum cleaners and “plein air” painting kits to the huge cylindrical gallery where the painting is displayed.

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Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com

Diane Parks, a volunteer, removes dusts the bayonet of a figure in the diorama at Atlanta’s Civil War Cyclorama.

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Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com

Under contract with the city of Atlanta, the Avery Gallery of Marietta brings together conservators and helpers Saturday to clean up the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama diorama.

The object of their attention wasn’t the 123-year-old painting itself, a gargantuan depiction of the July 22, 1864, conflict during the Battle of Atlanta, but the diorama that serves as the painting’s foreground. Added to the attraction in the 1930s, the diorama is a rolling, sculptural fiberglass terrain crossed with simulated railroad tracks and planted with artificial grass, fake bushes and about 128 figures made of plaster and paint.

From the audience’s perspective, seated in a gallery of steeply banked carpeted benches, the diorama and the painting blend together, so that it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends.

But climbing into the funhouse world of the diorama is disorienting. Figures near the audience are almost life-size, but grow smaller the closer they get to the the painting, until they are mere 17-inch garden gnomes in battle dress.

The volunteers circled through this virtual world, picking up paper clips, rubber bands, pennies and other litter that has fallen (or been propelled) into the scenery.

Then came the dusting, cobweb removal and vacuuming.

They were cleaning a simulated dusty battlefield, and distinguishing between the real dust and the stage dust isn’t always simple.

“Cleaning dirt isn’t as easy as it looks,” says Shae Avery, owner of Avery Gallery in Marietta and coordinator of the cleanup program, stretching out the cord to a small cannister vacuum.

“Maybe I need to dust Clark over here,” offers volunteer Diane Parks, turning her attention to one of the most notorious figures in the diorama, a dead Yankee soldier painted to look like a “Gone with the Wind”-era Clark Gable. “Hey baby, how ya doing?” she asks, running her purple dust wand under the plaster Gable’s nose.

Jim Parks, seeing his wife dusting, pretends he doesn’t recognize the activity. “She doesn’t do that at home,” he says.

After the cleaning was complete, the restoration artists looked for chips and scratches on the plaster soldiers, which they touch up with the browns, greens, grays and blues of the Civil War palette.

“We mix up our colors to make them look as dirty as possible,” says art conservator Leonora Okarma Weaver, as she arranges a canvas folder of brown-haired paintbrushes on the plastic grass. “We want that authentic antique look. Sometimes we use the contents of the vacuum bag.”

They don’t do any polishing of cannons or rifles, but, says Avery, “we do polish the creek to make it look like real water.” (The creek is made of a clear resin.)

Alan Young, painter and owner of a frame shop and gallery in Ellijay, says this is his first time cleaning up, but not his first visit. That was back in 1967.

“It looks better now,” he says, gazing at the canvas that towers 40 feet above. “It looked a little ratty back then.”