Destin artist pulls the rug out from under traditional decor

Eleven years ago, artist Reneé Hamrick’s sister gave her some advice about starting a sign company: Move to Destin.

“My sister came here on a vacation with one of her boyfriends,” Hamrick — then an Alabama resident, now a Destinite of 11 years — told The Log. “She came back home, she said if there’s anywhere you need to be starting a sign company you should come down to Destin — it’s beautiful. We came down two weeks later, we were (moved) here within six months.”

Today, Hamrick’s company, Expression Design Works, does a lot more than signs: She’s branched out into stylized frames for mirrors and artwork, and into painting rug patterns directly onto concrete.

“I had some paint,” Hamrick said, “and I thought instead of putting down a rug, I’ll just paint it down. It started from that. When we put the pool in, I said ‘I’m going to paint rugs everywhere out there.’ Then I started painting for people at their houses.”

Hamrick said the advantage of using her rugs is that you don’t have to vacuum or shake them clean. You can just hose them down since her special paint won’t run and outlasts regular concrete paint.

In addition, she said, a painted rug can be tailored to the owner’s decor and personality: One “rug” for a couple who likes margaritas shows two glasses, one sitting on the rug, one on its side and spilled.

As much as Hamrick loves art, her road has been a rocky one. A couple of decades ago, when she was 22, she said, she took her first oil painting class, then showed her pictures to one of her sisters; two weeks later, she got hit in a car wreck.

“I couldn’t pick up another brush until three years ago,” Hamrick said.

Now though, she’s painting rugs, making fused glass and designing her mosaic frames. One she’s done for a relative shows a mirror with a frame studded with angel figurines and a lantern.

“I went to a junk store one day. There was a three-inch presswood board around this painting, and I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen,” Hamrick said. “It was $11. I called (my husband) Robert and said that I know what I’m going to do ... That was exactly how I started in my mind ... What would be cool is if I could personalize it for people, taking broken pieces of dishes they like or special stuff.”

The best part of working in art, Hamrick said, is “to be able to visualize it in my mind and come out like I visualized. It’s fun — have the best time with this stuff.”

For more on Artist Reneé Hamrick, visit her online at http://expressiondesignworks.com