Brian Vicari, The Concrete Colorist,
Benicia, California

“You’ve got to dedicate time to play with the material by yourself, with the guys and in the studio,” he says. “That’s an important part of the process. You’ve got to have time to play if you’re going to be happy with your work.”

Vicari says he really gets fired up about the possibilities of concrete when he’s sampling and building mockups in his studio. “That’s where the fun stuff happens; that’s where you learn to push.”

For the past five years, he’s been pushing the liquid stone to create abstract concrete paintings. Initially, he says, the paintings were his own personal creative outlet, but family and friends have encouraged him to start offering his wares for sale. “Most of the paintings are done with overlays by troweling on different layers of integral colors and then using stains and dye washes,” he explains. And contrary to what you may think when you see one, “It’s all done with a trowel. There’s no brush involved.”

The paintings — which range from 2 feet by 2 feet to 4 feet by 4 feet — are made to be interior hangings. “They allow me to push what we can do with concrete in a limited area. My clients may not want this type of visual color on their floor but they can appreciate it on the wall,” Vicari says. “It allows the public to see what can be done with concrete and to appreciate concrete as fine art.” Because after all, concrete can be much, much more than just an ordinary floor, he adds.

Getting started
Vicari, 31, first started “playing with acid stain in a basement” right out of college, when he was running an office in Boulder, Colo., for a company that dealt with hardwood floors. Before he knew it, he was running a few crews that stained some 230,000 square feet of concrete floors at the Palisade Mall in New York. It was there that he struck up a relationship with Gary Jones and was introduced to Colormaker Floors, a relationship that continues to flourish today.

The floor of this beauty shop features Colormaker Floors’ Sgraffino, which was integrally colored and then acid-stained. Vicari then applied dye as an accent to create shading. He also added metallic to the sealer for a finishing touch.

“It was a great place to learn,” Vicari remembers. Although the work consisted of the “simple basic stuff, it was then I realized that there was a lot more creativity in that field,” he says.

From there, he held a short apprenticeship before going out on his own in 1997. By 1998, he was fully licensed as the owner of Custom Concrete Designs. By 2003, he was ready to incorporate and changed the name of the company to The Concrete Colorist. “The name change was so beneficial because it’s much more descriptive of what we do,” Vicari says. “We do no pouring of concrete. We specialize in microtoppings, acid stains and dye washes, as well as laser-cut and hand-cut stencil work.”