Mark Solomon learned the painting trade in San Francisco, then brought it home to Medford
A union apprenticeship in San Francisco shaped Solomon Painting, which has worked across the Rogue Valley since 1992 and sprays its doors and trim in a heated shop.
Medford, OR
In a photograph from 1982, Mark Solomon sits in rope rigging high on the face of St. Paul Church in San Francisco. He wears a white cap. A bucket hangs below his seat, and a city street runs straight away beneath him, a long way down. Far off, past rows of flat-roofed buildings, a tower stands in the haze.
He had been painting full time for about a year. He had come down from Medford, Oregon. “After graduating from Medford Senior High, I went to San Francisco and began learning the trade from my uncle’s painting company,” Solomon writes in a short history of his company.
A decade after that picture was taken, he came home and started Solomon Painting. The company has painted houses, offices and apartment buildings across the Rogue Valley since 1992. Its owner learned the trade the formal way, through a union apprenticeship at a big San Francisco shop, where he ended up running crews. Since 2007 the company has also had a heated building of its own, where doors and trim are sprayed before they reach a job site.
The training came in stages. After three years at his uncle’s company, Solomon joined the painters union and went to work for a large shop, Giampolini. He started there as an apprentice and went to school as one. “When I became a journeyman, they had me running jobs and crews for them,” he writes. He stayed seven years.
In 1991 he moved back to the Rogue Valley, where, he writes, his family has lived a long time. He worked for someone else for eight months, then started his own company in 1992. He incorporated in 2006 as Solomon Painting, Inc. The Oregon Construction Contractors Board licensed the company that same year.
The next year he built the shop. “I had a shop built in 2007 where we are able to spray trim in a controlled environment,” he writes. “It has natural gas radiant heat.”
On new construction, the trim starts there. The company sprays doors, casings and other trim pieces in the shop, then takes them to the job site. The spray booth sits on its list of services next to interior and exterior painting, historic buildings and cabinet refinishing. Solomon’s crews also paint furniture, do faux finishes and help customers choose colors.
Cabinet work shows up in the reviews. One customer who had the company redo an entryway and pantry wrote that Solomon was quick with a detailed breakdown of costs, that a painter named Bret did most of the work, and that both men kept in touch about when they would be there. The crew painted the walls and added and replaced cabinet doors. Another customer, whose kitchen cabinets Solomon painted, named Bret and a second painter, Rick, in a Google review and wrote that Solomon “uses high quality paint.”
The pictures the company keeps of past jobs show the spread. One is a timber lodge with snow on the ground and tall pines crowding its walls. Another is a kitchen of white cabinets under glass pendant lights.
Houses are only part of it. “Well, we do a lot of commercial work,” Solomon says. The company bids on new construction and on tenant improvements, the build-outs a business does when it moves into a space, and its state license covers commercial general contracting as well as residential work. The businesses it lists as regular customers run from doctor’s offices and hospitals to restaurants and factories. For a 600-unit apartment project, it bought a 42-foot man lift.
Some customers come back. A dentist wrote that Solomon had painted at his dental practice for years and had also painted two homes for his parents. One couple had used Solomon and his crew on several projects before they hired him again to paint the interior walls and wall base of their remodeled home, and they wrote that the painters were on time.
The crews work from Grants Pass to Ashland and in the towns around Medford, among them Jacksonville and Eagle Point. When the company has advertised for help, it has offered painters full-time, year-round jobs.
Solomon is particular about who he sends into a customer’s house. “I employ clean-cut responsible individuals,” he writes. The company’s short list of reasons to hire it ends with a plain promise: “We cleanup after ourselves.” One customer whose bedroom Solomon painted wrote in a review that he worked around the household’s schedule, did a little drywall touch-up while he was there and was “meticulous and careful.” Another wrote that the crew took a 60-year-old house and made it look brand new.
He ends his short history with a contractor’s sign-off: “Thank you for the opportunity to give you an estimate.”
Some of the labor goes out for free. The company’s list of charitable work runs from Habitat for Humanity and ABC’s “Extreme Makeover” to a children’s advocacy group and a school production of “Mary Poppins.” A note from Habitat, which the company keeps alongside its customer reviews, begins, “We are so thankful for your time as a Habitat volunteer. We rely on your hard work in order to provide local families a hand-up opportunity to purchase a safe and affordable home.”
The company still goes by the line “Since 1981.” That is not the year Solomon went out on his own. It is the year he started painting full time, the year before someone took his picture high on the face of a church in San Francisco.