Ever wonder how to find the special artists and artisans whose phone numbers often are tucked away in little black books by interior designers and only given out to best clients or sometimes persistent reporters? You know the ones: the men and women who use their talents to give a home a -- of panache; the ones who do all the neat stuff -- painting a striped rug on a hardwood floor, etching a bouquet of blue morning glories into a windowpane, or even painting Fido to hang over the fireplace.
You know they are out there, but where? They don't have stores. They usually don't advertise. Some don't even list phone numbers in the Yellow Pages. Their names appear in show-house brochures or you spy their work in a design magazine. But you can't find them.
Well, they are around and they are working hard, creating some interesting specialty items guaranteed to make your home that enchanting castle you knew it always was. We found five of these talented "by appointment only" people for you. There are hundreds of others, just waiting for you to find them.
Robert Cox
What happens when a classic, black lacquer Le Corbusier headboard no longer fits the decorating scheme? When a
Lutherville couple discovered they had just this problem, they hired artist Robert Cox to work a little magic. And he did, painting the headboard faux bois teak to match the other bedroom furniture. He also created a trompe l'oeil Japanese garden on the client's foyer closet and painted a shoji screen on a great room mirror.
Mr. Cox has been doing decorative painting and building specialty furniture, including paneled wood screens, for the last 10 years. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond with a bachelor of fine arts degree, he abandoned the world of advertising where he was working as an art director and turned a casual dalliance with the decorative arts into a full-time career. Now, at 42, he spends most of his days immersed in paint. One of his skills is painting rugs on hardwood floors, a surprisingly popular process that usually involves a trompe l'oeil detail of flipping up one corner. "You would be amazed how many people trip over the rug or try to avoid stepping on it if they think they have dirty shoes," he says with a laugh.
He has painted all sorts of oil-based rug designs, from simple cotton throw rugs to quilt-like Early American rugs to classic Oriental rugs. A popular request is a hearth rug to be painted in front of the fireplace. "The rugs can be removed with paint remover, but the paint remover also takes the floor finish," he cautions to anyone considering this slightly funky way to cover a floor. Robert Cox, (410) 685-6912.
Mia Halton
Mia Halton's wedding invitation is one-of-a-kind. A man and woman dance joyfully across a landscape that looks as if it might have been drawn by a happy child. As created by Ms. Halton, the scene is whimsical, yet sophisticated, painted in a style that you might not expect from a 40-year-old woman who has a master's degree in painting and teaches at the Maryland Institute.
Uniquely her own, it is also a style that Ms. Halton has incorporated into designs that she paints on fabric and sells as yard goods or tablecloths. Patterns include a cowboy motif with boots, hats and horseshoes; a kitchen motif with teapots, cups and saucers and ice cream sundaes; and a bluebird of happiness motif that Ms. Halton created for her own wedding and wedding reception.
"So far, I am holding to a theme for each design," she says, "but, I find myself getting more and more abstract."
Her images come from her paintings, ones that have been displayed at numerous galleries throughout the country. All painted free-hand and all slightly different, they reflect "the continuing movement of objects on a surface that has intrigued me all my life," she adds. The difference is that now the surface is 100 percent heavy-duty cotton, not canvas.
Ms. Halton's yard goods are being handled by Matches at Miley in the Washington Design Center. Her tablecloths are sold at the De Faux Haus on Harford Road. She will show both tablecloths and yard goods to clients by appointment. She is also available to paint yardage by commission. "I could copy someone's wallpaper design onto fabric, but I would probably make it just a little bit funky," she adds. (410) 243-3842.
Sharon Wolf
A former third-grade teacher, Ms. Wolf is a small, soft-spoken woman who combines an artist's eye with the practicality of an experienced businesswoman. She decided years ago that she "liked children in groups of one," preferably her daughter who is now 25. Having learned the techniques of stained glass during the 1970s, Ms. Wolf gave up teaching and focused her energies on learning how to etch and carve glass, techniques she felt offered more possibilities as an art and as a business than stained glass.
Today she is a specialist in the field, often called by large companies to handle problems. Presently working alone, she says, "I think I have the only glass company around that has no retail outlet, that doesn't mirror bathrooms, do leaded glass, sell supplies, or teach techniques. All I do is carve and etch glass."
Ms. Wolf makes her work sound very simple. Actually it is highly technical and requires protective clothing: headgear resembling a space helmet, and a bodysuit covering every bit of her. When she enters the windowless workroom in her studio to sandblast designs into panels of glass, she relies on "Big Blue," a huge fresh-air machine in a nearby room, to pump clean air into her helmet so she can breathe without the danger of inhaling minute glass particles.
Color is her forte and she has developed several techniques for air-blasting delicate pinks, greens and blues, along with just about every other color, on to the glass designs that are used for windows, door sidelights and transoms, kitchen cabinet doors, room dividers, shower and tub enclosures. Her painting studio is a window-lined room that faces a dense woods. It contains a series of easels for holding the glass panels.
"My color is distinctive," she says, adding that she often is hired to color glass for other companies. A recent project: accurately coloring a solar system design that had been carved into the back of a mirror during a bathroom re-do for a retiree from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "We used a fluorescent paint to put stars in the sky so that at night they appeared as they really do in the constellation," she adds. Sharon Wolf, (410) 239-3545.
Santo Navarria
Santo Navarria is following not only in the footsteps of his father, but in the footsteps of Navarria men for the last 11 generations. He is the last in a long family line of skilled artists known as cathedral workers -- men who used their many talents to build some of the world's greatest cathedrals. Today, he is one of the few men in the United States who still uses the old skills and techniques to do all types of masonry work, including mosaics, his specialty.
His residential customers find him when they have a project that needs special skills. "Usually people go to Europe and they stay in a grand villa and they come home with pictures of this foyer or that fireplace," he explains. "They show me the pictures, I get a sense of why they think it is beautiful and then I make it for them."
His house in Baltimore County is a display case for his work. Prospective customers get a tour that includes a good history lesson on what they are seeing -- from the marbled "jewel box" room, a traditional Italian entrance built for special guests, to the Spanish-influenced basement rec room with its Moorish fireplace and mosaic ship murals. Other highlights include the foyer with its elaborate ceramic tile and marble fireplace, the master bathroom covered floor to ceiling in ceramic tile, and the family dining room where dozens of mosaic birds, vines and grapes decorate the walls.
Since there is absolutely no place in the present house where another piece of stone or tile can possibly be added, Mr. Navarria is building a library with a marble floor and a masonry fireplace. When that job is completed, he says he will move. "We are builders," he explains with a grin. "We get joy from doing the job." At age 62, he is planning to build a new house reminiscent of a Mediterranean villa. Santo Navarria, (410) 771-4148.
Christine Merrill
When Christine Merrill was 12 years old, she painted her first commission -- a racehorse belonging to Baltimorean Susan Knott. She was paid $25.
The price of her work has gone up considerably since then. A few years ago, when she was in her late 20s, she received $13,000 for an oil painting that featured nine bull terriers and one pet pig romping in front of a baronial mansion.
While this was and remains her highest-priced painting, Ms. Merrill routinely gets between $5,000 and $7,000 for her commissioned portraits of people's best loved pets. She will paint any animal, but she focuses on dogs because, she says, "I love dogs, they are my favorite animals. They come in all varieties and in all sizes, yet they are all the same species, which I think is pretty amazing." And unlike cats who like to run away and hide under sofas, "dogs are eager to have their portraits painted," she says with a laugh, adding that she has never had to deal with an unruly canine.
Christine Herman Merrill, a fourth-generation artist, grew up in Roland Park and was classically trained at Baltimore's Schuler School of Fine Art. Painting in a realistic style, she does oils that are reminiscent of portraits painted by 18th-century artists. Occasionally, she lets in a bit of whimsy as in her "Angel Dogs" painting that features a Jack Russell terrier, a Pomeranian, a toy fox terrier, a toy poodle and a Chihuahua, all decked out in classical angel wings, floating serenely through the air.
Once working only in Baltimore, often from commissions generated by paintings that hung in the Valley Inn on Falls Road, Ms. Merrill is now represented by the William Secord Gallery in New York City. She travels all over the country, first photographing and then painting dogs of the rich and sometimes famous. She has painted Barbara Taylor Bradford's bichon frise, Geoffrey Beene's dachshunds, and Malcolm Forbes' bull mastiff and Norfolk terrier. She even painted former first dog Millie, a portrait that hangs in the Dog Museum of America.
She still paints for people in Baltimore and is working on a portrait of three Norwich terriers for a local woman. "Wherever there is a dog that needs a portrait, I will paint it," she adds with a smile. Christine Merrill, (410) 433-3126.