When Dorothy Boger moved to her home in Collingwood, she couldn’t figure out how to paint her son’s closet. She knew that her co-worker at the time, Charlie DeWitt, was artistic, so she turned to him for advice.
“He [Charlie] used to make caricatures for everybody. He would make all the cards for the office,” said Boger. “I also knew that he was taking art classes.”
Boger was thinking of having a simple design like a tree house painted in the closet. The result far surpassed what she had envisioned and began a new adventure for both her and DeWitt.
After talking with Dorothy’s son and discovering what he liked, DeWitt came up with a medieval castle design. Complete with medieval knights throwing rocks and shooting bows and arrows, the closet came alive. A large shelf inside the closet was painted to look like a wooden platform, and along the side walls he created depictions of the crowd watching jousters in action.
Boger was thrilled with the result and a while later started thinking about another problem she had. “I had three live majesty palms in my bedroom, and they kept dying, so I decided to have Charlie paint one instead,” she said. Now that she has a vividly colored palm tree painted in the corner of her bedroom, she doesn’t have to worry about palm trees dying anymore.
The next project was a small basement space that Dorothy and her husband, Bill, had turned into a wine closet. What to do with a drab, dark wall? Create a scene reminiscent of an Italian vineyard, seen looking through an archway onto the Mediterranean seas. Very effective.
Friends began to see what DeWitt had done and wondered how he could help them with their design problems. Boger said that she would be DeWitt’s point of contact. Mary Figliola wanted a scene painted in her son Joey’s room. With an oceanography background, Figliola had a good idea of what she wanted, and using some photographs from Wyland books, DeWitt was able to create an almost-life-size depiction of whales, parrot fish and kelp. Wave-like shadows around the whales create an illusion of movement, and the mural creates a focal point in this boy’s room.
ANOTHER NEIGHBOR had a problem in her kitchen. The previous owner had installed green tile around the perimeter of the counter. Not quite ready to renovate, the owner didn’t want to start ripping out the tile. She gave DeWitt a sample of the window treatment and asked him to paint a design on the tile.
Within a couple of hours, gone was the green, and in its place was an antique off-white base with fruits and vines gracing the tile.
Although he doesn’t plan to quit his day job quite yet, DeWitt would like to do more paintings. He’s currently a lobbyist for the New York Mercantile Exchange. Before that, he worked for an Idaho congressman on Capitol Hill, which is where he met Boger. He grew up in Bethesda, Md., and graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English. He now resides in Alexandria.
“I took a lot of art classes and had friends who were artists, but I realized that it was a hard way to make a living,” he said.
DeWitt uses acrylics because they are the most versatile for painting surfaces. He likes to take his time and spent the better part of three or four days painting the wall for the Figliolas.
“I like to do things you can look at and use,” he said. “I really enjoy it.”
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