By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Katherine Bish
“There may not be a better example of trompe l’oeil in the United States—or France, for that matter,” Home & Garden Television said of his murals for Dennis and Judy Jones’ palatial home in Ladue.
He loves painting roses, clouds, peacocks, palm trees and angels—but there’s nothing delicate or pretentious about muralist Claude Breckwoldt. Dressed in painting clothes, his gravelly voice inflected with a South African accent, the corners of his eyes often crinkled up in laughter—“affable” is a mild way to describe him. He learned to paint at Saint Louis University, one of the last institutions in the country to teach indirect painting, a difficult technique where the artist first lays down the dark values, working up to the lighter ones. That was how da Vinci painted—and modern artists do precisely the opposite. But it was the Surrealist Salvador Dalí who got Breckwoldt “all riled up about painting.
“In the first paragraph of his book, Dalí says the way to succeed is to mimic the masters. That’s been my thing, to try and paint like a master,” Breckwoldt says. It has worked like a charm in St. Louis, where tastes are generally traditional. Yet Breckwoldt has been asked at times to deviate from his earthy palette of golds, greens and blues … and in one case, his basic painting style, when he gave one wall in a child’s bedroom a splashy, Abstract Impressionist look.
“I was flinging paint at the wall with a brush. I had such a sore arm! It was like throwing fastballs all day,” Breckwoldt laughs, “because when you throw paint on the wall, you have to throw it hard enough so that it splatters and doesn’t run.”
He says his clients let him lead the way—“Maybe because I’m older now people trust me more,” he chuckles, though he notes that he’d still shy away from the funky abstract stuff anyway, not just to avoid getting pitcher’s elbow.
He went with a classical mural in his own home, inspired by the Venetian artist Tiepolo. “You can see Tuscany in the background,” Breckwoldt says. “I framed it in cartouches, with angels sitting on clouds—it’s just very traditional and classical. Whenever I have a tricky customer who just doesn’t know what to do, I’ll show them this painting, and usually it’s ‘Wow! When can you start?’”
Breckwoldt refuses to use projectors or to hide his painting techniques, and laments that the beautiful marbleized wood in many of St. Louis’ Victorian houses will never be reproduced. “At the turn of the century, they’d throw a sheet around their workspace so nobody could see what they were doing, so that is all lost forever.” Because he doesn’t want to “do the sheet thing,” he trains his crew to be his competition, and claims he loves sending more working artists into the world. He picks up quite a bit of work due to a misstep in the past, a mid-century blunder: painting over the mahogany moldings in the Central West End mansions. Rather than ripping out a fireplace and having it stripped, clients hire Breckwoldt to wood-grain it—a very practical application of his superlative trompe l’oeil skills, the same skills he taps to produce some fine art on canvas. “I want [the trompes d’oeil] to look like they’re just jumping out at you, so people just feel, ‘Wow! That’s so wild!’” Breckwoldt says. Though, as always, there is an earthy consideration to his decision.
“Maybe,” he jokes, “I’m just getting older and that scaffolding is getting tiring!”
To see more of Claude Breckwoldt’s work, go to www.classicmurals.net.
