About
For the past two decades Iris Lee Marcus has been busy covering homes, restaurants, and businesses with outstanding decorative and faux finish treatments. Her work can be found extensively in her native New England, but it also appears across the continent from California to North Carolina and Maine.
CONTACT IRIS professional painter since 1982, Iris paid for her education at the Massachusetts College of Art by working as a contractor for fine residential painting. Thus when she switched entirely to decorative work, she was able to use her expert practical knowledge of paint (as well as of ladders and staging) to reinforce the artistic techniques for which she has become famous.
Iris sees her task as transformation. She likes to work with the way light hits a room, playing with colors and visual textures to make the space come alive. She knows where to place accents and when an area needs to be quiet, supporting other elements in the room. “For me,” she says, “a room is like a 3-D canvas, waiting to be filled with movement, life, and balance.”
Iris loves her career. Using her high energy, physical strength, and artistic focus, Iris finds herself one day doing an organic wall-finish that suggests antiquity, the next day painting faux marble on 18 columns in a large formal space, and a few days after that starting an intricate mural in a chinoiserie style.
Color remains Iris’s inspiration. As an expert in color theory, she regularly does design consulting specifically relating to color. She enjoys working with clients and designers and helping them bring their ideas to fruition.
Iris lives with her partner, two dogs, and two cats in a small Victorian house surrounded by a beautiful garden in a village 30 miles west of Boston.
