Photos and story by Ben Barnhart

Early one December morning, the crowd parts for Rebecca Graves ’90G as she weaves her way through London’s Heathrow Airport, although she doesn’t cut an especially imposing figure. Pretty and petite, she wears a black dress over black stockings with knee-high leather boots. Even after a red-eye flight from New York, she has a genuine smile. It’s her huge suitcase—almost half her weight—that plows a wide swath through the horde of travelers.

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Graves has trekked to Britain towing a vast formal wardrobe and a small workshop of fabric, tassels, and fringe for her latest project on a Cunard ship. The Queen Victoria, Cunard’s new ocean liner, docked at its home port of Southampton, will be named by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall Camilla Parker Bowles in just two days. Graves has designed the decorations for the formal Captain’s Ball that will crown the festivities.

Graves runs a decorative painting business out of her studio in Brooklyn, a business she started in Northampton in 1991 after completing her MFA in sculpture at UMass Amherst. Using beautifully textured faux finishes, trompe l’oeil paintings, surreal murals, and custom-designed wallpapers, rGraves&Co. has transformed tony condos on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as well as glamorous retail spaces for clients like shoe designer Stuart Weitzman. Graves has created scenic backdrops for installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art and, for Michigan’s Soaring Eagle Casino, a 6,000-square-foot mural based on the tribal artwork of the Saginaw Chippewa Indians.

For the past decade she has also worked for Cunard, designing and installing event decorations for its fleet and traveling around the world in the process. Having flown in and out of port cities from Dubai to Sydney, she’s unfazed now when a driver doesn’t appear at Heathrow as promised.

“Unfortunately, this happens on occasion,” she says. Graves is a Louisville native and uses her Southern charm at the airport’s help desk to place a few quick phone calls. Within a half hour she is on the road to Southampton.

Graves’s mother, Betty, was an ardent traveler. She loved Greece especially and spent much of her later life in faraway places. Graves took it as a sign when, three months after her mother’s death in 1997, a co-worker on a decorative painting job mentioned an opportunity to work on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and travel around the globe. Even though Graves had just moved her business to Brooklyn, she pursued the lead. Shortly after, she was on a plane to Hong Kong, where she joined the ship for a voyage to Bombay. She recalls with a laugh, “I had to leave in three weeks and have enough formal wear for six weeks!”

For the last 10 years, Graves has juggled her decorative painting business and her artwork with working at sea, first on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and later on the Queen Mary 2. She has years of experience creating public art projects, from painting murals in Louisville as an undergraduate to designing posters for PVTA buses as an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst. During her graduate student years she also taught an art installation class.

Graves connects her Cunard design work with her background in sculpture, saying both are like “solving three-dimensional puzzles.” Her designs must be durable—they’re expected to last 10 years—and must be easily and quickly installed for an event, and just as easily disassembled and stored onboard, where space is at a premium. They must be large and bold enough to stand out in a cavernous ballroom with 20-foot ceilings and complement the room’s color schemes and architecture, and, of course, enhance the mood of the evening. When Cunard called with a lucrative contract to design decorations for five themed balls in the grand ballroom of the Queen Victoria last September, there was an added challenge. Graves would have just a brief time between the conclusion of the ship’s construction and its launch to do her work. She decided she could pull it off.

She researched the Victorian era for ideas and flew to Venice, where the ship was being built, to measure the ballroom and get a feel for the space. Then she shopped New York’s garment district for fabrics and trimmings and went to work using graphics software to create a look for the room. She settled on five sets of eight large banners, to be hung from metal extension rods, with a different theme for each of the galas.

Her design for the Captain’s Ball: seven-feet by four-feet silk shields screened with regal gold-and-black designs incorporating Cunard’s logo of lion and crown. Quilted and edged with gold fringe and tassels, the shields would hang from ornate rods also bearing the Cunard logo and laser-cut from a single sheet of one-inch aluminum. Graves worked with her regular Brooklyn cadre of silk-screeners, seamstresses, and metalworkers to meet her deadline, but she was nervous about the mounting hardware. The custom-made aluminum brackets had to be strong enough to support the 10-pound banners and rods during events, yet unnoticeable at other times.

Working and living on an ocean liner, which Graves likens to “a small city,” has its oddities. Hurry up and wait. Work in the cold ship’s hold by day, or in the early morning hours when the guests are asleep, but dine in a five-star restaurant by night. Float along in an insular world of opulence and wealth to the most exotic places and meet people from every corner of the earth.

Being accustomed to all this, Graves isn’t surprised to find both good news and bad news waiting for her when she finally boards the Queen Victoria in Southampton. The banners and hardware have arrived safely and are waiting to be loaded onto the massive vessel, along with tons of other supplies for the maiden voyage, but the ship’s rigging crew has determined that the metal walls need a reinforcing steel plate to support the mounting brackets. Graves will have a two-hour window between the champagne gala and the Captain’s Ball to install her work. With luck, the steel plates will be in place by then.

In the meantime, Graves goes about prepping for the installation. Armed with a swatch book, she sets out in the cold rain blowing off the North Atlantic to find paint matching the color of the Queen’s Room walls. She unpacks the banners and steams out wrinkles until the windows of her tiny stateroom fog over. Dressed to the nines, she also dines on duck carpaccio and chateaubriand in the lavish art deco Britannia Restaurant, samples a long menu of martinis in the proper Commodore Club, schmoozes with guests, and reconnects with crew members she’d met on the QE2 and QM2. All in a day’s work.

On the morning of the launch, just hours before royalty is due to smash a champagne bottle across Queen Victoria’s bow, Graves learns the rigging crew can’t put up the steel plates. So she rolls out Plan B. She hangs the banners from balconies overlooking the ballroom, using a makeshift arrangement of plastic pipe and quick-ties. She’s disappointed her three-dimensional design won’t be seen at the inaugural ball but hopeful that the brackets will be in place before the next one. “These problems have a way of working themselves out on the ship,” she says.

Graves considers herself an artist first and foremost. “Party decorating was not really on my list of career aspirations. This is just a job,” she says. “But,” she quickly adds, “it’s a really fun job.” Even when working on an ocean liner, she is never far from her passion: she has thick sketchbooks full of watercolors and ink drawings done at sea.

In a week, Graves will be back in New York, tending her business and involved with art. She is board president of Smack Mellon, a gallery and studio program in Brooklyn, where she works closely with director Kathleen Gilrain ‘92G. Together they designed a program called Art Ready that connects high-schoolers with city artists and designers. Graves has also just kicked off a mural project with younger students. It’s that close contact with art that motivates her life and work in the city, but those demands also limit her studio time. Maintaining that balance is its own special kind of waltz.

For now those concerns are stowed away. It’s time to don a party dress, sip champagne on the high seas, and have a ball.