North Country at Work: Keene Valley as canvas; Marcy Neville on the art of house painting
Marcy Neville works on a much larger scale than most artists. If you’ve driven through Keene Valley, you know her work. If you live there,...
Oct 16, 2018 — Marcy Neville works on a much larger scale than most artists. If you’ve driven through Keene Valley, you know her work. If you live there, there’s a fairly good chance your home has been one of her canvases. That's because Marcy paints houses - interiors and exteriors - and historic buildings.
Falling in and out and in to house painting
Marcy sort of "fell into" house painting in her twenties. She was working as a jeweler and selling one-of-a-kind pieces all over the northeast, but when the price of silver skyrocketed, she took a few odd jobs painting houses to help boost her income. She eventually switched to house painting full time.
When she tired of house painting, Marcy went back to school for a degree in landscape architecture, which led to a job as Town of Moriah planner working on economic development. About ten years into her job as planner, Marcy was feeling restless. The work had gotten increasingly bureaucratic, and she started to daydream:
"I started thinking about how could I be outside more and not be sitting in front of a computer and going to conferences all the time...and I went back to house painting!"
She says there are a lot of perks to the job and that it's great for a single woman.
"Flexibility with your schedule, and if you're someone who likes to work hard and do physical work and be outside a lot it's great. It's a beautiful place to do it. And it pays really well."
She's never suffered for work; in fact there's usually more jobs than she can handle. And she says she actually appreciates the monotony of the work: "Monotony is a way to let your mind do something else. I don't have to watch the paint dry, I know what I'm doing!"
Historic work
Alongside her regular house painting gigs, Marcy's made quite a name for herself painting historical buildings and structures. Those are often anything but monotonous; she's worked on century-old clock towers, old church steeples and church interiors, even waterproofed an old furnace in Tawawus. She says once she was known by a few contractors and they saw how meticulous her work was, they started feeding jobs to her.
Through the historical work and through painting older houses, Marcy has become an expert on local builders and artisans, even the ones who are long dead.
"Carlos White has a certain type of window trim, and Eli Montgomery Crawford cuts his shingles in a certain way, and you start to recognize them. And it's always interesting to talk to the people who own them, because quite often they've been in their families since the 19th century and they know all the history. That's been fun."
Marcy is an expert glazer of old windows, a skill most modern painters don't develop. Historic buildings and restorations are right up her alley because she really enjoys tricky detail work.
"I really like to paint sash! I like little, very precise painting."
Working on a large and dangerous scale
Marcy loves the little stuff, but she also has to work big. For larger homes and special projects, she relies on lifts, which she says have revolutionized house painting. She shows me a photo of an old church and explains she and her crew needed three different lifts - a 60-footer, a 40-footer, and a 25-footer, to get high enough. She much prefers lifts to ladders - "they don't fall out from under you!" But they also come with their own challenges:
"They're enormously heavy, so you cannot drive over a septic system, you're just gonna disappear. And you can't hit any wires, you'll be electrocuted if you hit any wires! Getting these lifts in and around the wires is tricky."
She rarely asks her crew to get the lifts into position, preferring to do it herself. She says it's a delicate dance, and not one where you can afford to make a misstep.
A unique perspective
Marcy's work has taken her to places most people will never visit; to the tops of church steeples and the interiors of old stone buildings. She says the view from her "office window" is ever-changing and a lot higher than most. She's on lifts or climbing up rickety scaffholding. She remembers one particular job where she painted the clock tower of the Keene Valley Congregational Church in the summer of 2012. She had to scrape off the clock hands and re-paint them, and carefully restore the clock face; each number was hand-painted onto the glass. But the really magical part was the machinery that no one could actually see.
"To get to the inside of the clock tower you had to go up a rather rickety ladder arrangement on the inside of the church. And the gears for this clock are all wooden. You can't see them unless you get into the inside of that tower. It's really kind of an amazing machine."
Marcy has memories of every building she's worked on.
"I get to know these buildings. I look at every square inch."
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