LONGMONT — Lighten up, Francis: That’s not a corpse — it’s art.

Longmont Police received a call Friday morning from someone reporting a face in concrete in the river — specifically, Left Hand Creek, where it flows under a bridge at South Sunset Street.

An officer checked it out and discovered that, indeed, there was a doomed-looking visage with its mouth agape, staring at the sky with its nose, cheeks and chin protruding over the water’s surface.

But no foul play is involved: the concrete face is merely part of Longmont artist Jerry Boyle’s installation, “101 Faces,” a series of pieces strategically placed along the Left Hand Greenway.

The artist’s work, commissioned in 2004, has faces in trees, embedded in the grassy hillsides and, in this case, the creek.

Steve Ransweiler, the city’s project manager on the Left Hand Flood Control Project, said that because of that project many of the faces needed to be relocated from their original sites. And he said that, no, to his knowledge, no one has ever called the city and reported the faces as real.

As for Longmont Police, “It was not the first time,” Cmdr. Jeff Satur said Friday, although he could not recall how many times police had been called about Mr. Stone-Face-In-Creek.

At a quick glance the face is, indeed, fairly realistic looking, at least to a reporter. But you know what they say about reporters.

“It is pretty realistic, and now it has more moss on it. I first saw it last summer,” said Denise Daniel, out walking her dog, Saffron, on the path Friday afternoon. “But no, I never thought it was a body.”

Boyle could not be reached for comment Friday. But he told the Times-Call years ago, in a comment reiterated in a Johnnie St. Vrain column last year, that his pieces, strewn along the trail as they are, are designed to get people looking around and paying more attention to their surroundings. If they’re noticing his faces, they’re likely paying more attention to the flora and fauna, he said.

“I started looking after I saw Johnnie St. Vrain,” Daniel said. “Before that, my dog would look at squirrels and I would look at birds. But I never looked at the faces.”

Tony Kindelspire can be reached at 303-684-5291 or at tkindelspire@times-call.com.