Dawn Cleaves: Photo by Kim Leeson
Although Dawn Cleaves has spent decades expertly wielding a paintbrush, artistic license is often the last thing on her mind.
Some of the tools used by Dawn Cleaves. The “paint elevation” of the stairwell mural. Photo by Kim Leeson
The important thing, she says, is that the person paying for her time and talent gets exactly what he or she wants, whether it’s an elaborate wall mural depicting the Tuscan countryside, a cartoonish panda bear for a little boy’s room, or an entire wall painted to look like it is made of expensive marble.
“My designers like the non-pretentiousness,” Cleaves says. “If they ask me to change something, they know I’m happy to change it, because it’s my goal to make them happy, not to be stuck on some artistic vision.”
Cleaves is the owner of Artisan Finishes, an award-winning decorative arts company based out of Cleaves’ East Dallas home. The bulk of her work is in faux finishes — painted finishes that look like something real, like marble, wood or stone — but decorative art also includes murals, trompe l’oeil, lettering, gilding, plasters and antiquing.
“Most of my stuff is custom to the client,” she says. “In my world, everything I do is different. It’s rare that I do the same thing twice. I have people ask me all the time, ‘Well, have you done this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, but I haven’t really done anything I’ve ever done before, before that time that I did it.’ ”
Cleaves originally went to school for architecture, but she didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy and soon switched over to designing sets for theater. She eventually approached the movie union, seeking better work for better pay.
Her first assignment was to paint a patch that had been burned in the wood floor. Although she’d never been trained to paint wood before, she set to work matching the colors and grain. When she finished, she asked the producer to approve her work. When she walked back into the room, the producer was standing on the wet paint.
“I said, ‘Well, I guess it was OK because you couldn’t tell where it was …’ ” Cleaves recalls, laughing.
From then on, she began painting sets, furniture and pretty much anything else for movies, which eventually led her to New York, where she met her husband.
Her husband’s job brought them to Dallas. By that point, she’d already left the movie industry and had started her finishing business. It was a bit of a struggle to move the business from New York to Dallas, but she managed to make the leap.
Artisan Finishes won the American Society of Interior Designers Designer’s Choice award two years in a row for faux finishes and decorative arts.
Recently, Cleaves painted concrete bollards for Black Walnut Café, as well as the mural at the newly opened Ebby House at Juliette Fowler Communities.
