About Paul Montgomery Studio

Paul

Paul Montgomery has been an artist his entire life, and has proven to be versatile and engaging in a broad range of mediums, styles and genres.  Early paintings were copies of beloved old masters and the European schools.  Still life studies and landscape painting were his favorite themes, and helped found his abilities at detail and realism.  Chinoiserie was an inspiration after a visit to the Freer Gallery in Washington in his late teen years.  This sparked a life-long love of the unique perspective of the sensitive interpretation of nature as seen in Asian paintings and screens.

Divider sun

A chance meeting with a decorative artist who had been commissioned to paint classical European sky ceilings with figures in a Miami home was instrumental to his introduction to even larger projects.  He embraced this love of custom large painting and offered this service to interior designers nationwide and received many commissions during his early twenties.

He moved to California at 25 years of age and was fortunate to obtain a position at A.T. Heinsbergen Company, the premier decorator of the old movie palaces of the 1920’s and 30’s.  Restoration of the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento constituted a several-year project, on which he was given the task of re-designing and personally hand-painting the Historic Governor’s Office ceiling, which was taken from original photos provided by the Architectural Commission.

Roses full scale

After five years with Heinsbergen, he ventured on his own in West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and garnered numerous large projects for celebrity customers, clubs, and hotels.  Soon he was directing a crew of artists for on-site decorative painting projects in luxury hotels around the world, from Jamaica to Japan.  Working large and fast was a challenge that he enthusiastically embraced.  This was the real battlefield of mural painting — proving that versatility and talent, with dedication and hard work, can successfully bring an old world craft to modern interiors, meeting a wide variety of requests from interior designers and architects.

Paul young
Circa 1978 — Painting at the Oculus of the dome of the CA State Capitol building.

Awakening his love of Chinoiserie wallpapers, he successfully designed and created beautiful rooms for residential projects and Asian hotels. This led to the need to engage the painting skills of the best craftspeople available, whom he commissioned to produce several lines of hand painted silk wall coverings.  Composed of panels that joined to create murals, the stunning effect is created using the same methods and techniques as was done for hundreds of years in China.  These wallpapers have grown in popularity in the United States and worldwide and today enhance many styles of interior decoration and bring delight to the discerning art lover who experiences these lovely murals.

An early Asian inspired scenic on gold leaf as a screen. Circa 1979
An early Asian inspired scenic on gold leaf as a screen. Circa 1979
A contemporary Chinoiserie design as a screen from the 1980s
A contemporary Chinoiserie design as a screen from the 1980s

Murals on canvas and painted on site were included in interior design projects worldwide for many years.

The company now offers an ever expanding, exclusive range of designs, themes and colors in both Chinoiserie style and classical scenics of exotic locales around the world.  The murals are all designed by talented artists in Virginia to meet custom requirements or as standard designs, then produced by staff artists.  The company’s Panoramic Collections of scenics are hand painted in a style imitative of French woodblock printed paper of the 18th Century.  These detailed and involved murals are lovely voyages through places of natural beauty, heritage and culture.

click here to view a retrospective of past mural projects.

click on any image below to view entire retrospective
Artist
An artist applies finishing touches to large fresco panels.
Venice
A large triptych of a Venetian view after Canaletto commissioned for a residence in Pennsylvania.
Great China
The Great China mural, one of several murals in the Panoramics Collection.
Ceiling
A ceiling in  a Hollywood home done in the 1980s.