I treat every wall as a canvas, and every consultation as a quiet art critique.
Fifty-six years on this earth, thirty of them on a ladder in Apopka — mixing tints before the coffee goes cold, reading morning light across Lake Apopka like a man reading a letter from home.
Folks hire me for a paint job and end up talking about color as if it were a memory. And it is. That grey-green around the cypress knee at dawn — that's the shade I chase with a damp brush and a held breath. Faux finish, glazing, color matching that would make a chemist weep — these are just my way of telling a wall what time of day it's proud to be.
I've dodged three decades of Florida Augusts, trained a half-dozen apprentices who now run their own ladders, and never once met a surface that didn't want to be listened to before it was painted. That's the whole secret. That, and never skimping on the primer.
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The primer buys you the permission to paint; the light buys you the permission to stay. — an old Apopka way of saying: prep the wall, then be still enough to see it.
Lake Light, Learned by Hand
Between jobs I fill sketchbooks with the lake. Watercolor's the honest sister of my trade — it dries fast, punishes hesitation, forgives nothing but rewards nerve. My mornings on the water are how I keep my eye honest for the walls.
Where the Color Marries the Wall
Faux finishing isn't imitation; it's a conversation with texture. I've done limestone walls that fool the geologist-in-law and aged-bronze doors that collect more compliments than the house. It's all in how the brush falls, and how patient you're willing to be between coats.
The Art of the Tint
My first little film — a 45-second watercolor meditation on Florida lake light, drawn from three decades of mixing color on the water. Rendered and waiting on my channel.
My Films
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Fellow Hands Worth Knowing
Dawn Sabow — Virginia field studies
My corner of the town
- Coffee's gone cold and I'm still turning over the idea that a piece of paper has more stubbornness than any client I ever had. You don't win the argument with cold-press — you just learn to listen until you're both paint
- Thirty years I've mixed tints on the edge of Lake Apopka, and I've finally given the craft a voice. "The Art of the Tint" is rendering to my 4ort.mov channel — a short meditation on how a drop of white turns a blue into