Gaye Goodman, owner of Faux Real sits on a completed floor at the J&R Vintage Auto Museum in Rio Rancho New Mexico. BUSINESS HISTORY
Faux Real was started in 1995 by Gaye Goodman, a woman artist in her forties who had struggled for 26 years to sell enough of her paintings to make a minimal living wage. She loved the textures and shapes of weathered rocks, old plastered walls, and doors with layers of paint peeling off and hinting at history. She strove to reproduce these layers and implications in her abstract oil paintings, but was not skillful at marketing herself to galleries, and too thin-skinned to withstand the numerous rejections involved in the clannish and fad-infested art marketing system. In the meantime she worked as an art teacher, waitress, flight attendant and belly dancer to support herself.
One day a friend gave her a book on faux finishing with illustrations and directions. She realized that there was a fine tradition of painting surface imitations of natural wood and stone stretching back beyond the Renaissance. She began to study and practice these techniques, which seemed quite straightforward, given her years of painting practice.
She had recently moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and knew only a handful of people in the city. One of them was a carpenter who worked on movie sets and remodels. He put her in touch with a friend who was working on a restaurant remodelling project. The floor of the restaurant was a concrete slab 60 years old and covered by sections of carpet, tile and wood. The restauranteur wanted an elegant-looking floor painted to look like marble. He had tried real marble in a past business and found it too easily stained and difficult to care for. Ms. Goodman arranged to help clean and paint it for him. She knew that the concrete must be etched with muriatic acid solution to provide enough ëtoothí for the paints to adhere well. She went to a local store which carried all the supplies for concrete contractors and asked how she should prepare her slab. The clerk said 'Well, you can do that, but have you heard of these new acid stains which contain colorants and actually etch the color into the slab? They are known for looking like stone or marble.' She was thrilled by the idea and the illustrations on the brochures the clerk gave her. She read over the 8 pages of instructions five times, then ordered a sample kit of stain and pursuaded the restauranteur to let her experiment on his floor in an area behind the bar which was to be hidden.
At 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, after work, she and an artist friend who specialized in paper-making travelled to the restaurant to play with the stains and see what transpired. They tried various techniques suggested in the literature for making patterns, from kitty litter and ironite to rags, accepting some and discarding others. They also tried 5 brands of masking tape before finding one which made a clear line between stain colors. The restaurant owners (there were actually 5 partners) liked the effect of the samples, accepted her bid and designated one partner to help them remove the tile and mastic from the slab and fill the largest holes, a job which turned out to be 75% of the prep work.
The slab floor covered 1700 square feet and was divided into booth areas, table and bar areas. Gaye looked at the real marble floors depicted in books of Renaissance paintings and chose a design of interlocking rectangles to give the restaurant an antique elegance. The narrow bands of lighter color were the same width as the square columns the architect had arranged down the center of the room and appeared to spring from them.
The project took about two months to complete, as there were some interruptions due to other construction elements and the two women were often working at night, long after their other jobs. The restaurant owners were experienced in constuction and were taking the time to do a really fine buildout using their own labor. In working side-to-side the two artists and the owners became friends, so that even when Gaye poured some diluted patching compound down the kitchen sink and the next day the pipe had to be removed, all she received was a good-natured scolding.
When the floors were finished and waxed the owner was so pleased that he had Gaye faux paint the interior walls to look like the pale pink plaster so popular in the Southwest. She used 12 tints and tones of latex paint, some brushes and sponges, and got an effect so truthful, that a plasterer who had been hired to work on some outside walls, walked right up to it and asked what brand of plaster had been used.
Finally, after 6 or 7 months of rebuilding, the restaurant opened as O'Hare's Grille and Pub in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. (see first illustration) Due to the new Intel computer chip facility located down the street, Rio Rancho happened to be the ìfastest growing small town in Americaî that year. OíHareís had many imported beers on tap and became a natural meeting place for construction workers and bosses after work. The owners found that the dark polished floors generated converstion and compliments. They handed out hundreds of Faux Real's new business cards.
For a year afterwards, Gaye and her artist friend worked part-time on floor jobs from mansions to garage re-dos. In December of 1996 Faux Real bid on and received the job to stain about 10,000 square feet of floors in a spa and tennis club being constructed in an upscale development on the outskirts of Santa Fe. She felt it was time to quit her day job working as a real estate agentís assistant and take the plunge into full time contracting. She obtained a contractorís license in painting (since there is no category for floor staining), hired more artists, got a million dollars worth of insurance and workmenís comp coverage and has been a successful subcontractor ever since.
The work of staining involves a good deal of heavy labor, moving floor buffers from place to place, carrying water from outside pumps and mopping floors with heavy string mops. At the same time it requires enormous patience and attention to detail. If one speck of paint or tar is left on a slab, it will show through the stain like an accusatory finger. Some months are filled with jobs and some months there is no work to be found. Ms. Goodman is convinced that the best employees for such roller-coaster conditions are fine artists. They have other projects to occupy them in the off-times and an understanding of the creative process that is vital to the job. When the stain goes down you are "working blind" since the color does not develop for four hours. It takes the confidence and faith of an artist to work without immediate feedback and to take joy in the accidental things that happen on each slab to make it unique. Most artists are not afraid of hard physical labor, detail work, and the unexpected. They look at each crisis as a puzzle to be solved. Gaye pays her artists well and makes every effort to nurture their spirits as there is no way she would have a business without them.
Faux Real now consists of 4 artist-employees and the owner. Ms. Goodman does not feel that the company should grow too large for the attention to detail that is necessary in creating artworks, even if they are on peopleís floors. Her ambition is to land jobs that are large and intricate in far-away places, with clients willing to bring Faux Real on site for the time necessary to complete the work. She speaks French, Spanish and some Japanese and has lived abroad for parts ofl her life. Her artists wish to have adventures in other cultures as well.
Please consider Faux Real for a really outstanding job on your next floor staining project.
[All photos courtesy of Jerry Rabinowitz Photography]
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