Masterfully painted faux teak transoms are all a beautification of steel or fiberglass, a deception disguising the fact that the boat isn’t made of wood. Those transoms are often 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 past several years, Richter has dominated the faux-teak paint scene. She paints boats for Merritt, Viking, Rybovich and private clients. But just seven years ago, if you had 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. She’s a self-taught painter who studied business in college.
“I started doing art when I was pretty young, [around] 3 or 4 years old with my mom,” she says, adding that as she got older, “I started doing work on large buildings.”
Seven years ago, Richter was 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,” she says, “and I thought, Why would you do that? It’s such a beautiful boat.”
The captain said he thought it was great — that it looked just like teak. Richter knew she could do better. She didn’t know boats, but she knew paint. She also knew Roy Merritt, founder of Merritt’s Boat & Engine Works, because she grew up going to school with his grandchildren. He took her under his wing.
“First, you have to understand what teak is,” Merritt told Richter, before putting her to work with his carpenters for two months. Eventually, he gave her small samples to “teak” and had her working alongside his painters to coat hulls. Then one day at the factory, he walked her over to a sportfishing boat and slapped the transom. “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 a $6 million boat. Later that day, when she finished, Merritt came back around to take a look. “I think we’re onto something,” he said. After she worked on several more boats, he referred her to Michael Rybovich & Sons. Initially, her plan was to paint 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 nameplates because she didn’t know how to work with gold leaf paint. The pair became too busy to keep up with demand, so she learned that art from him.
“I’ve done over 903 boats in seven years and counting,” she says. “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 tracking all the places where she has painted. Her goal was to paint on every continent, and she accomplished that, save for Antarctica. Now, she says, she can visualize how a boat should be painted at first glance. From there, she brainstorms with the client about the boat’s 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 says. “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 meets with her designer to plan out how an idea can materialize. The designer creates a few mock-ups, which they show to clients. They then finalize the art before it’s painted on the transom.
“You’ve got to get it done right,” she says, adding that she often has to work fast because craftsmen need access to the boat, as well. “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.”
Her favorite projects include a boat named In My DNA. “This particular client works with DNA, and he wanted to have something tied together with that topic,” Richter says. “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 has painted for everyone from Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson to Johnny Depp. “Johnny’s is cool,” she says. “It’s a Burger boat — it’s almost like a pirate ship, but it’s a 140-foot megayacht,” Richter says. “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.”
When she’s not painting boats, Richter is painting aircraft or murals — often belonging to the same clients as the boats. When she’s not working, she tends to her horses at her home in Jupiter, Fla., or volunteers with children who have autism.
As for future career goals, Richter has two in mind: First, she wants to paint a superyacht hull, and second, she wants to paint 100 boats by the end of 2022 so she’s officially left her mark on a thousand vessels.
This article was originally published in the January 2023 issue.
