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Walk in, look up
By JUDY STARK, Times Staff Writer
It also took about six months. A few weeks before Christmas, a quartet of cherubs finally took their position on a hand-painted ceiling mural. Their new home was not in a chapel, as some might expect at this time of year, but on the ceiling of the foyer of a home in Belleair Bluffs. The artist, Donna Petruccelli of St. Petersburg, craned her neck to see her finished work in place at last, 26 feet above. "I wasn't too sure about the mechanics of getting it up there," she said, "but I'm very pleased." Petruccelli, a longtime decorative and fine artist (her Web site is www.dp-finearts.com), was approached last spring by builder Bill Byington of Shoreline Construction Group. He was building a house -- a 6,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style mansion on the water -- and wanted some special treatment for the ceiling of the round bell tower.
But Petruccelli was not enthusiastic about spending hours on a scaffold high in the air, painting directly on the ceiling. She and her husband and business partner, Joe, came up with the idea of painting the mural on two pieces of canvas, which would be stretched on a pair of semicircular wooden frames. The frames would be hoisted up to the ceiling and held in place by a circular molding. Petruccelli painted the mural on canvas on her living room floor, using acrylics, then glazed it with an acrylic medium to give it an "Old World" look. The task took about six weeks and cost "upwards of $5,000," she said. Her grandchildren inspired the "big fat babies," she said. They stand about 5 feet 6 but look much smaller when they are smiling down from the heights above. She turned to a cabinetmaker, Stephen Johnson of Stephen D Fine Cabinetry in St. Petersburg, who made a pair of semicircular frames edged in three layers of 1/4-inch lattice with 3/4-inch pine spokes for strength and support. Then the finished canvas mural was stretched and stapled onto the frames.
It all sounded so simple. But remember the woodworkers' adage, "Measure twice, cut once"? The original measurement given to Petruccelli and Johnson was that the frame should have a radius of 69 inches. But upon closer inspection (and remeasuring), the radius was only 653/4 inches. Oops.
On a recent morning, as the house neared completion, employees of Shoreline Construction carried the two frames up the mansion's curving staircase to the second floor, then hoisted them up to three workers who stood atop a scaffold in the three-story foyer. Each frame weighed about 30 pounds. The workers wore rubber gloves to avoid dirtying or tearing the canvas. With some body English, some pushing and no small amount of sweating, first one half, then the other was snugged into place. Worker John Burgoyne used a nail gun to attach small pieces of scrap wood to the walls to hold the frames temporarily. A curved crown molding around the edge and a center strip between the two halves was attached later. And the fit was perfect.
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