Canvas to Transom
How one artist jumped ship to become the world’s most dominant faux-teak painter.
Written by: Shane Scott –
Photos by: Mary Beth Koeth
From Jimmy Buffett to Capt. Jack Sparrow, how a Florida artist became the world’s most elusive faux-teak painter.
When you behold almost any masterfully painted faux teak patterned transom, you may notice something nearly all have in common: a deceptive beautification of steel or fiberglass disguising the fact that the boat isn’t actually made of wood. The second thing these boats have in common is that they’re probably the work of a woman with no business cards, no website and no way of reaching her except by word of mouth or social media. Her name is Monique Richter. For the last several years, Richter has dominated the faux teak paint scene, transforming transoms around the world. She paints boats for Merrit, Viking, Rybovich, as well as several private clients. There are very few places in the watery world you can go without seeing Richter’s work. But just seven years ago, if you asked her whether she’d be painting more than 20 yachts a month, she probably would have laughed before turning her swivel chair back to a half-painted canvas. Although she’s traditionally a practitioner of fine arts, Richter studied business in college. As for painting, she’s self-taught. “I started doing art when I was pretty young, three or four years old with my mom, [and when I got older] I started doing work on large buildings,” Richter said. Seven years ago, Richter was relaxing at a marina in the Bahamas when she saw a fishing boat with faux wood. “It literally looked like someone smeared brown paint on the back of a boat, and I thought, ‘Why would you do that? It’s such a beautiful boat’” Richter recalled. She saw the captain nearby and asked him what she was looking at. “Isn’t it great?” he responded. “It looks just like teak wood.”
Richter didn’t say how she really felt, but she knew that if the captain thought his paint job looked good, she could do better. She didn’t know boats, but she knew paint. She also knew Roy Merrit, founder of Merrit Boats, as she grew up going to school with his grandchildren. After expressing an interest in trying her hand at faux teak and quitting her day job, the builder took her under his wings.
“First you have to understand what teak is,” Merrit told Richter, before putting her to work with his carpenters for two months to gain familiarity with the wood.
Eventually, Merrit gave the Richter small samples to “teak” and had her working alongside his painters to coat the hulls. Then one day at the factory, he walked with Richter over to a sportfishing boat and slapped the aft side.
“This is your new canvas,” he told her. “It’s just paint right? If you mess up, you can just start over.”
Richter nodded nervously. This was still, after all, a six-million-dollar boat. Later that day when she finished, Merrit came back around to take a look. “I think we’re on to something,” he said. After working with Merrit on several more boats, he referred her to Rybovich and Sons where her stern portfolio further expanded. Initially, her plan was to do one transom per month and focus on fine art, but once word got out about her work, demand spread like wildfire.
For the first year, Richter only handled faux teak painting. She had a friend, John Tito, handle the all-important boat name lettering, because she didn’t know how to work with gold leaf paint. But business kept thriving, and the pair became too busy to keep up with demand. Ultimately, Tito taught her gold leaf painting, a trade carefully passed down from one painter to the next.
“I had never used an airbrush in my life, so I had to figure out how to do it; it’s completely different than a water-based paint,” Richter said. “The paint is based with solvents—it’s the same paint you’d paint an engine room with.”
“Now I’ve done over 903 boats in 7 years and counting,” she said. “I do about 20 to 30 boats a month—I fly a lot. I fly to Cabo next week for three boats. Most of my work is over in places like Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico.”
Richter keeps a map in her room tracking all the places she has painted. Her goal was to paint on every continent, and she’s accomplished that, save for Antarctica.
Now, she says she’s reached a point in her career where she can visualize how a boat should be painted at first glance. From there, she brainstorms with the client about the boat’s pending name.
“I try to talk it out with them, especially if there’s a marlin involved or if it’s personal—like a wife’s name or a daughter’s,” Richter said. “But if it’s a hard name, it really comes down to out-of-the-box thinking. Like one that was called Fish Tank, for instance—I did that one with a really bold font and painted a marlin driving a tank.”
After ideas have brewed, Richter will meet with her designer, and together they’ll plan out how an idea can materialize. The designer will create a few mock-ups, which they show the clients for feedback. They then fine-tune and finalize the art before printing a layout of the name and art that Richter will ultimately paint onto the transom.
When she gets to her spray booth, Richter says she zones out, totally focused on her creation. And she needs to be, because she’s not leaving indelible marks on a paper canvas, she’s working with multi-million dollar yachts.
“You’ve got to get it done right,” Richter said. “There’s some hustle involved. I can’t worry about outside things because I have to get this done. There are a lot of other hands waiting to work on a boat after you. I tell the people clear coating after me, ‘I’m going to be done in two hours.’ So there’s a lot of pressure involved in making things perfect. The hardest thing about my job is being creative while staying within crunch time.”
When asked about her favorite projects, there are a few that come to mind.
“I would say the most unique one we’ve ever done was a boat called In My DNA,” she said. “This particular client works with DNA and he wanted to have something tied together with that topic. You know how DNA is a spiral? Well, he also fishes, so we took marlin and other sport fish and we had them inside the fill, in a DNA pattern. We had to do these intricate fish inside the letters with a double outline—it was the most technical job I’ve ever done.”
Richter’s other favorites are often celebrities’ boats; she’s painted for everyone from Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson to Johnny Depp.
“Johnny’s is cool,” she said. “It’s a Burger boat—it’s almost like a pirate ship, but it’s a 140-foot mega yacht. It had this teak mast that went up and it has a viewing tower, like a crow box where you can look out. It’s carbon fiber but I made it look like teak wood. I got to meet him—really cool guy, very interesting, not what I expected.”
When she’s not painting boats, Richter is painting jet planes or wall murals—often belonging to the same clients that she’s painted boats for. When she’s not working, you’ll find Richter tending to her horses at her home in Jupiter, Florida, or making time to help others, starting with children who have autism in her community. Often, she’ll do both at the same time.
Richter owns five horses, two Friesian and three minis. They reside within her own home based boarding facility that she has hand painted with renderings of horses displayed across the barn doors. Once a month on Saturdays, she has local children with disabilities come out to pet and spend time with the mini horses.
“It’s a way I give back to my community” Richter explained. “A lot of kids that have autism and things like that can have a connection with animals, Horses help kids that are inward to bring out their personalities.”
As for future career goals, Richter has two in mind. First, she wants to do a custom design hull paint job for a superyacht—in a similar fashion to the wrap technique that was applied to Michael Jordan’s yacht. Second, she wants to paint a hundred boats by the end of this year—so that she’s officially left her mark on a thousand vessels.
