Jay E. Baptiste is a man who loves his work and his life. The Pittsfield resident is a successful decorative painter and restorer who did painstaking restoration work at the Thaddeus Clapp House, an upscale bed and breakfast that opened in the city last month.
Sitting in the living room of his exquisitely decorated apartment, Baptiste tells me about his 20-year career of painting and restoring, his paint-stained hands and pants evidence of that work. Baptiste, who is 44 but says, "I still feel like a kid," reveals that this is the first time he has been interviewed.
Having started his career as an antique restorer, Baptiste's plate now includes decorative painting on house interiors, restoration and gilding on furniture, wall finishing and glazing, mural installation, Venetian plastering, and grain painting, including wood graining, leather graining and marbleizing, especially of marbles that are not quarried anymore.
He also occasionally does trompe l'oeil paintings, which are paintings that create such a strong illusion of reality that the viewer may not at first be sure whether the things depicted are real or a representation. In this style, he has painted doors or windows and has done "sky ceilings" as well, which are ceilings with a painted image of the sky.
The large number of variables involved with decorative painting make it appealing to Baptiste. "It's an interesting field because its endless," he said. There are also a large number of variables involved with interiors and furniture, two things he loves, he said.
He spent his summer juggling work at the Clapp House and an apartment restoration project in Manhattan. At the Clapp House located on Wendell Avenue, he restored intricate, ornate designs on plaster ceilings. This restoration was challenging, he said, and included the making of molds. Despite the difficulty of the work, he said he enjoyed working at the Clapp House partly because it is a "historic building in Pittsfield." Noting his desire to "see Pittsfield turn around," he called the Clapp House "a stepping stone for Pittsfield."
Much of Baptiste's summer was spent living in Manhattan, which he said was great, as he worked on the apartment restoration. That project, which could possibly be featured in a national design magazine, began the second week of June and is presently concluding. A transformation from contemporary to more traditional, the apartment restoration involved woodgraining, the upholstery of walls, and restoration of ceramics and French furniture.
Baptiste has done jobs in Berkshire County, Connecticut and Manhattan but has never done any north of the county or in the Boston area. His jobs in the Berkshires — 80 percent of his total jobs — are almost all in South County, but has has done some in Pittsfield also. Of the jobs in the county, 99 percent of the homes are second homes.
He said there has been a great deal of work for him in Berkshire County over the last five years; it was different 10 years ago, he said.
The composition of his jobs has varied over the years. Four years ago, half of his jobs were decorative painting and half were restoration. Today 80 percent of his jobs are decorative painting, which is "much more lucrative," and 20 percent are restoration. The past couple of years, he has been "out of the shop" and doing more on-site work.
His jobs vary with the season, too. He does more furniture restoration during the winter and sometimes does two or three jobs at a time during the summer.
Baptiste was born in New Jersey, where he lived briefly. His family lived in Tacoma, Wash., until he was 5 years old and then moved to Hong Kong. Baptiste lived in that city, where his father was a vice president for Merrill Lynch, from the time he was in first grade to eighth grade. Then his family moved to the Berkshires, where he has lived in Pittsfield, Lenox, West Stockbridge and Washington Mountain. Baptiste has also spent five years of his adult life in St. Paul, Minn., and a couple of years in the Worcester area.
He said he has always been drawn to the arts but doesn't exactly know why, although he said elements of art and furnishings were part of his upbringing. Every member of his family is artistic in some way, he said. One of his sisters works in the fashion industry; the other is a fashion photographer. His brother, who works for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, loves art, and his father has done goldleafing work for much of his life and is currently redoing his house.
One of Baptiste's first memories of restoring something occurred when he was 15, and his father gave him an old mirror frame to strip and refinish. After high school he went on to study at the Isabel O'Neil Studios in New York City. He studied with the late O'Neil, whom he called a "very interesting woman."
He has learned different restoration and decorative painting skills over the years from different people. He learned how to do furniture touch-up, which he said is tougher than refinishing, from an "amazing guy" in Connecticut. Over the summer he attended a decorative painting show in Orlando where he learned "a completely new medium" for himself and one that commands high prices, Venetian plastering. He learned how to do casting and molding when he worked at a Worcester company that designs and manufactures all the bookends for the Barnes & Noble Corporation. He was mostly responsible for specialized finishes. Besides that job, he said all the jobs he has held over the years have been artistic and creative or have involved furnishings [furniture] in some way.
He has done customer service for a Levitz Furniture location in Minnesota and has worked with autistic children, doing art projects with them. He has also cooked at a restaurant. "I've always had my hands in the arts — somewhere," he said.
In the future Baptiste said he might branch out into retail and open a store with decoratively painted furniture, room dividers and screens.
But, as of late, he has been extremely busy and happy with the jobs he has been getting, the people he has been meeting, and the results he has been producing. "I love my life. I have a good life. I don't know what I'd do if I wasn't doing this."
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Winter Storm Warning Issued for Berkshires
Another snowstorm is expected to move through the region overnight on Friday, bringing 5 to 8 inches of snow. This is updated from Thursday's winter weather advisory.
The National Weather Service in Albany, N.Y., has posted a winter storm warning for all of Berkshire County and parts of eastern New York State beginning Friday at 4 p.m. through Saturday at 1 p.m.
The region could see heavy to moderate snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour overnight, tapering off Saturday morning to flurries.
Drivers should exercise caution on Friday night and Saturday morning, as travel conditions may be hazardous.
Saturday night should be clear and calm, but warming temperatures means freezing rain Sunday night and rain through Monday with highs in the 40s. The forecast isn't much better through the week as temperatures dip back into the teens with New Year's Eve looking cloudy and frigid.
Many homeowners are showing their holiday spirit by decorating their houses. We asked for submissions so those in the community can check out these fanciful lights and decor when they're out.
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