Colour and light and all things bright - that's what this business is made of. Since Dublin artist, Louise Allen, founded Paintworks, a commercial interior murals company in 1995, its turnover has grown five-fold. She and business partner, Sinead O'Reilly, have increased an initial turnover of about £50,000 (€63,486) into £250,000 four years later.
Chances are the vibrant contemporary frescos by the two 27-year-olds have gazed down upon you, while you've gulped a coffee and sticky bun in Bewley's cafes, supped a pint in Nestor's bar, Limerick or checked in for the weekend at the Killarney Court Hotel in Kerry. Ms O'Reilly has been with the company from the beginning, working on most of its 60 projects to date. In 1997, she joined Ms Allen at the helm. They have since added up to 12 staff artists to their number and moved into a Dublin city-centre office/studio in November last year.
The prosperity of the business lies, say the two, in successfully "challenging the notion of art in interior design". Others might add that their work is confident, energetic, vibrant - resonant of a prevailing national mood - and that there has been a concomitant boom in the pub, restaurant and hotel industries which provide the canvases for their work.
The vogue for wall-covering Graham Knuttel-like illustrations marks a departure from the conventional paintwork-with-pictures-hanging school of commercial interior decorating. One of the first to make that departure was the Bewley's Campbell group. Winning the tender to festoon the walls of its new Bridge Bar on Dublin's Westmoreland Street in 1996, gave the company its biggest ongoing contract and some of the best advertising in town.
There, the deep turquoises, rich blue, red and yellow hues and illustrations of jive and dance give an elegant bluesey backdrop.
The admiration of coffee and pint customers earned further commissions at Bewley's Cafes, coffee shops and hotels here and in Britain.
Their work can also be viewed in nightclubs and bars: Copperface Jack's in Harcourt Street, Dublin; Nestor's in Limerick; McNally's bar in Monaghan; and the Galley pub in Clonakilty. It can be seen too in the Strike Four restaurant and bar in Belfast; in Bootsy Brogan's pub in Fulham, London; in Sinead's Irish pub in Rotterdam; and in the Tir na nOg pub in Seattle.
"One of the big concerns for us in this business is that the work doesn't look the same," says Ms Allen. "We work either with architects or directly with the client; discuss what ideas they have, what they want. Then we go and brainstorm, do out some rough sketches and they say they `like this', or want it to be `more like that'." A big job of, for instance, a three-floor pub and nightclub, would take, they estimate, one month. The Globe in Limerick, for example, took just over five weeks.
Over the past four years competition has intensified. About 20 companies are now vying for this kind of interior mural work, where four years ago Paintworks was one of just three or four. There have been no grants or government support for the enterprises, as the product ambiguously straddles the line between business and art. Neither Enterprise Ireland nor the Arts Council saw the company as fulfilling its criteria for assistance.
Nonetheless, it is set to open a premises in Boston within a year, with the help of the Massachusetts Port and Trade Authority. With a further eye on the future, Ms Allen says the industry "is going to change". She feels commercial interior decorating will become more geared around lighting, visual displays and even decorating themes that can be changed "every six months say".
"You see it already where pubs like the Globe in Dublin hang pictures and sell them like a constantly changing art exhibition."
Or the actual decorating designs could, says Ms O'Reilly, be stored on discs or slides and projected onto the walls; lighting could be altered.
"If art in a space is changing regularly," she says, "people are more aware of it."
