Trompe l'oeil master Tim Macko

Tim Macko COURTESY PHOTO Trompe L'oeil specialist Tim Macko has a life many would envy. He owns two businesses, one practical, one inspiring. He's traveled to some of the world's most exotic locales, and regularly treks to South America, where he hob-nobs with the upper echelons of power and society. Home base is his own Moroccaninspired island abode.

oversees his successful window-cleaning company on Sanibel and Captiva Islands. After hours and during the off-season, however, his critical eye helps put a different set of tools to use: Mr. Macko cracks out his paintbrushes to create dazzling faux scenes and enhancements on his clients' walls, ceilings, built-ins and furnishings. Many of the handsome homes where the personable artist keeps the windows sparkling are the same that bear his artistic touches. His passion — creating magic with paint — doesn't stay a secret for long, and clients commission Mr. Macko before heading north around Easter.

Trompe l'oeil, which translates to "fools the eye,'' can be as simple as a painted vine over a doorway, or as elaborate as an entire wall being transformed into a garden view through open 'windows.' Mr. Macko's work often depicts classical scenes, or vignettes from nature. "The classics will endure," he says. While some clients know exactly what they want in terms of visual enhancement, "many of them leave it up to me," he admits, "because I look at their interior and where it's going. Everything I do is pretty logical."

He creates whole-room murals, oil paintings, portraits, landscapes, and architectural pieces in French Empire, contemporary, country, and European styles, among others and stresses his decorative projects are only limited by imagination. He's painted an entire master bath in an underwater scene. One client's fireplace — in a contemporary Washington, D.C., apartment — was transformed with silver leaf, versus a traditional stone look.

"I embellish things;" he says, "little things to tie the house together." As an example, the artist points to an armoire where he's finished the insets of the cabinet door interiors to match the walls of the room; a subtle, but very effective touch that gives a piece of furniture a custom look.

Mr. Macko recently refinished the kitchen cabinetry in a Sanctuary estate home on Sanibel. He used eight layers of paints, primers, crackle glazes and varnishes, for a slightly distressed, antique look that appears "like it faded and crackled over time." The result blends beautifully with the English Garden theme throughout the home's adjacent great room. "It was such a production," says Mr. Macko, "but so worth the end result."

The same can be said for Mr. Macko's rich wall finishes. He'll swathe a living room in a soft, subdued glaze for those wanted a striking background for their own furnishings and art.

The artist finds a way to enhance any space. "It's all to the personal taste of the owner," he says. "I don't have one style. That's what keeps me busy."

A longtime globe trotter, Mr. Macko took a break between art schools to join the Peace Corps. He spent three years in Yemen, where "the old city of San'a in North Yemen is right out of The Arabian Nights." He's been to Kathmandu ("One of my favorite places; very cool,") and India. The most beautiful thing he's ever seen? The Taj Mahal. "I was truly moved by it," he says. "I cried when I left." Mr. Macko's own home on Sanibel is Moroccan-inspired.

As if his past weren't enough inspiration, Mr. Macko spends at least three months a year in Rio with his best friend, who's a Brazilian, and is ombudsman for the secretary of state. While his days are primarily spent in and around the Governor's Palace, even the squalor of mountaintop favelas (Portugese for "shanty towns") are a surprising inspiration. "Rio is the capital of graffiti. The best in the world is there. Some of these artists belong in museums," he says. "It's a way of self-expression that's not 'pretty,' . . . but neither is their life. This urban graffiti intrigues me," he says. "I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'm so inspired by it."

Mr. Macko has clients from New York to Sanibel, and will soon be adding Rio to the list. "I have a job waiting for me in Copacabana Beach," he says. "It's for Brazil's chief of staff, for the secretary of state."