Maria Ranieri, Custom Artist

Artist Maria Ranieri gave a lively talk at our April 11 members' meeting. Maria has over 30 years experience creating custom art for clients throughout the area. Her art graces many beautiful homes -- on their walls and most spectacularly, their ceilings. She started at age 17 learning the skills of faux finixhes, custom murals, and decorative finishes. She works with the client, designer, and contractors to translate their vision into beautiful home decor.

Her talk took us through the planning, design, and execution of her projects. She showed many of the samples that she paints for her clients, and explained how she comes up with some of the paint combinations. She kept us laughing as she shared stories of challenging projects and lessons learned from experience.

Maria is a very successful professional artist. For our members who might paint for fun, it was so interesting to hear how hard she works the business side of her job. We sometimes forget that professional artists need to spend half their time with their recordkeeping. Maria's experience with this was quite informative. We had a packed room and our members loved her examples and the photos of her work that she passed around. You can see examples of her work on her website called customartinc.com.

Maria was supported by her talented husband, Bobby Gugliuzza. Bobby, aka BobbyG, is an artist in his own right and often assists her in her projects. However, his greatest talents lie in the field of music. Bobby is a successful singer and songwriter who has played at Wellington Art Society functions in the past. You can see him April 28 at 8:00 p.m. at the Wellington Amphitheater. For more information, call 561-352-7474. You can visit his website here.