Lucas Peltier
Ever since he was 17, Rob Wilkerson has been perfecting his craft of faux painting. Now 51, Wilkerson has painted and repaired sky ceilings at Paris Las Vegas and the Miracle Mile Shops. He’s also worked on projects at Caesars Palace.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 | 2 a.m.
I t's midnight on the Las Vegas Strip when Rob Wilkerson and his team step into the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood to begin setting up their painting equipment.
Wilkerson steps onto the lift, rises past Middle Eastern-themed shop fronts and points his spray paint gun at the ceiling to coat the false sky in another layer of wispy white paint — a cloud to join the many he’s added to the existing layer.
The clock is ticking. The crew has a deadline of 7 a.m. to make progress on the ceiling, and Wilkerson wants to finish this night. He can’t be too impatient, though, he said.
“I don’t want to turn out unsatisfactory products, so I won’t stop until we’re done,” Wilkerson said. “You have to take pride in your work.”
All artists have their audience. For Wilkerson, it’s the hundreds of thousands of visitors each week to the Resort Corridor.
He has painted and repaired sky ceilings at Paris Las Vegas and his most recent project, the Miracle Mile Shops. He’s also worked on some soffits — material to cover the underside of roof overhangs — at Caesars Palace that he outfitted to look like marble, Bobby Flay’s Amalfi restaurant and Martha Stewart’s The Bedford in the Paris.
The 51-year-old started painting and getting involved with faux finishing — a decorative painting technique in which artists create realistic designs on walls that emulate other materials — when he was 17 years old. What started as a summer job then turned into a passion, he said. Wilkerson took an apprenticeship in Salt Lake City soon after to improve his craft and ended up in Las Vegas by the time he was 25.
“While I was doing my apprenticeship, I learned a lot about faux finishes and about this being a very gratifying and rewarding type of work,” Wilkerson said. “You have to be creative, so I just kind of stuck with it and eventually got better and better.”
He’s been on the scene in Las Vegas since 1997 doing faux finishes before joining the Anning-Johnson Company, a contracting business, about 4 1/2 years ago, he said.
For the past two weeks, he has spent his nights alongside his partner and apprentice — Jason Dillinger — redoing the ceiling near the mall’s water show.
Revamping parts of the Miracle Mile Shops has been in the works for a few years, said Robert Buchanan, vice president and general manager of the mall. The process was pushed back due to COVID-19, and official renovations began in January 2022.
“We’ll just enhance what was already good here (and) what we’ve heard so many people say they really enjoy or really like about Miracle Mile Shops,” Buchanan said. “All the Instagrammable moments are all still here, (like) the rain show … the big ship.”
The mall outfitted its exterior with more modern LEDs, and the water show in the Lost City area — a piece of the shops’ past history as the Desert Passage — has new features to “create an environment that’s exciting.”
It includes new piping for the simulated rainstorm and 3D mapping technology with more than 30 projectors in the area to create a more immersive water show, Buchanan said.
The water show “was just kind of an experiential sort of attraction for the property and it was housed in that Desert Passage, that Arabian bazaar feel with facades (that) led to the ambiance or general feel of that area,” Buchanan said. “We decided to hang onto it.”
Replacing piping in the ceiling meant removing some of the false sky that covers it, and Buchanan needed someone to redo the iconic image. Buchanan said the shops wanted to retain the sky ceiling as a way to pay homage to the history of the Desert Passage.
That’s where Wilkerson and Dillinger came in. To Wilkerson, the work is gratifying, but can come with some difficulties.
One of those is the stress he experiences when having to redo a sky ceiling that he didn’t originally paint, much like what he’s doing at the Miracle Mile Shops. He said each artist had their own flair they added to their work, and attempting to replicate that can cause some obstacles.
“Trying to match what’s already there can sometimes be stressful, trying to get the same level of finish that’s already existing there that we’re trying to tie into, sometimes it takes a little longer than anticipated,” Wilkerson said.
For this project, Wilkerson said it would typically be done in under two weeks, which includes the process of matching paint colors. This sky ceiling has taken a bit longer, though, because of the repainting process, type of tools needed and work schedule.
Wilkerson and his team have been painting this ceiling using large equipment sprayers and conventional spray paint guns to cover more area alongside other construction material to help them reach the ceiling. He said that setting up this equipment cuts into an already tight work schedule, so he and his crew are able to paint for only about five hours a night.
While the painting process has taken longer than expected, Wilkerson and his team are not only excited to finish, but to also start on some of their upcoming projects. Wilkerson said they’ll be working on Red Rock Resort next.
“It’s gratifying when people are taking photos (of my work, and) it’s always nice to be able to say, yeah I’ve worked for Bobby Flay or Martha Stewart at this job or that job,” Wilkerson said. “(But) I just hope everybody’s pleased when I’m done.”
