When he was a boy living on the Gulf Coast, Bill Moss would entertain himself by walking nearby railroad tracks. Those railroad tracks, you might say, provided young Bill with an early art lesson.
At school, to the wonderment of his second-grade art teacher, he incorporated the vanishing perspective of the railroad tracks into his work.
This would not be the last time Bill would find artistic inspiration virtually at his feet.
After graduation from Caldwell High School, Moss majored in fine arts at Mississippi State University.
From college Bill moved to New Orleans.
Larry Collums, a childhood friend, urged him to look up his older brother, the late Hal Collums, who was doing historic renovations in the French Quarter and Garden District.
As a project leader for Collums, Bill soon encountered the technique of faux finishes.
“A painter (working on one of his jobs) was doing marbleizing, but it didn’t look real,” said Moss, who went and got a piece of marble and set about teaching himself the craft.
“I bought every book I could find on the subject,” he said.
Faux painting (“faux” is French for “false”) is a decorative painting technique used for esthetic and economic reasons to replicate marble, stone and wood.
“If you’re going to do it, make it totally real,” he told himself. In time Moss would be painting the faux finishes on the company’s jobs.
After 10 years in New Orleans, Moss was ready to come home.
He moved back to Columbus and began to call on decorators — among them, Linda Sneed, who offered encouragement — to make them aware of his expertise with painted finishes.
In the beginning, business was slow.
Word of Moss’ talent spread, and before long he was working all over the region.
He figures in the 30 years he’s been working as a painter, he has wood-grained over a thousand doors and worked in over 100 antebellum homes.
Moss also loves to teach. For 13 years he taught art at Annunciation School. He teaches a three-hour class in acrylic painting for adults every Monday at Fairview Baptist Church.
“If you’ve got a gift, you need to share it,” he says.
Currently Moss is helping Charlie and Dana Stephenson, who are near the end of what has been a three-year renovation of Waverley Mansion.
Moss has spent seven months working on what can only be termed a stunning upgrade of the venerable mansion.
As you ascend the porch of the original mansion, you comes face-to-face with three of Moss’ doors. He has transformed pine doors into aged quarter-sawn English oak. The effect is subtle, but beautiful.
In all Moss will grain 16 doors in the Clay County mansion.
Moss and his wife Ruthie have three daughters, all of whom are artists, he says. As for Ruthie, an executive with BankFirst, “she takes care of the finances,” he says.
As for retirement, Moss knows what he wants to do: teach and paint. That said, he has no immediate plans to retire.
“I’m 65, but I don’t feel it,” he says. “I’m going to keep working as long as I can climb a ladder.”
Friday afternoon I walked across the street to take a look at the sanctuary of Annunciation Catholic Church, arguably Moss’ master work.
Completed in 2000, the sanctuary takes as its inspiration Sainte-Chapelle in Paris with its soaring stained-glass windows and star-covered ceiling.
I’d been to events at Annunciation, mass, funerals, performances of Handel’s Messiah, so I am no stranger to the space.
The lights were adjusted at a low level. The effect was quietly sublime: the deep red marbleized columns, the fleur-de-lis stenciling on the mustard-colored pilasters, the deep blue ceiling with its galaxy of gold stars (11,000, plus or minus 500, says Moss).
This is a treasure, I said to myself.
Karen Henry who served on the interior committee supervising the construction of the building talks about the project as though it was yesterday. She remembers the first time Moss saw the space.
“His eyes lit up like none other,”she said. “From there, it just blossomed.”
Almost a quarter of a century later that sacred space continues to blossom. Just as it will far into the future.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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