A Product Is Not a Finish
Fifty years in decorative coatings, across two markets, taught Barry Affleck that a label rarely survives the trip. He opens Free Friday at Fine Finish Expo 2026.
Ask an Italian plasterer for Venetian plaster and you may get a puzzled look. By the Europeans' account the term was coined in the United States. What they make is Marmorino, marble-like plaster, and the look itself they call classic, or one of several other words that describe a finish rather than a material.
That sounds academic until it costs you a job. Marmorino is a product. Venetian plaster is a result. An acrylic plaster can fairly be sold as something that looks like Venetian plaster, because the look comes out of the application. It cannot fairly be sold as Marmorino.
Barry Affleck has spent fifty years watching that confusion play out on real walls, and he opens the lecture programme at Fine Finish Expo 2026 with a session on the material at the centre of it.
Fifty Years, Two Markets
Barry has worked in decoration for more than fifty years, in both the North American and the European markets, and he now teaches courses for applicators across the continent. The knowledge came from installing all manner of coatings rather than from studying them, and that distinction is the one he presses hardest.
His current work is with Protek, a Canadian owned company behind more than seventy years of manufacturing paint and wall texture products. His role there is to help companies understand what the North American market actually requires of a coating. At the Expo he appears as the founder of Texturline Plasters, now consulting with Protek. Applicators, manufacturers, professionals and enthusiasts all end up asking him the same kinds of questions, which is how a working tradesman becomes a reference point.
Why the Instructions Do Not Travel
Here is the problem that occupies much of his time. A European product arrives carrying a label, and the label is entirely correct. In Europe.
Products made by traditional methods there are applied to masonry. Here they go onto drywall. Same bucket, different wall, different behaviour. Add different environmental conditions and different construction methods and a set of instructions that was accurate at the factory becomes a liability on site.
His position is not that imported coatings are bad. It is that, with a few exceptions on this continent, imported coatings need changes in application if they are to perform and to keep the qualities that made them worth importing in the first place. A manufacturer who has genuinely done the homework for this market will tell you what those changes are. Many have not done it.
A Product Is Not a Finish
The vocabulary problem runs alongside it, and it is the more dangerous of the two because everyone involved assumes they are talking about the same thing.
Venetian plaster, Marmorino, lime paint, polished plaster, acrylic decorative plaster. Each means something different depending on the country, the manufacturer, and the technique in the hands doing the work. Most of the foreign names printed on labels describe a finishing technique, not a product.
Separate the two and a specification conversation gets a great deal shorter. Fail to separate them and a client, a designer and a contractor can use a single word for three different results, and nobody finds out until the wall is finished.
Trust the Hand, Not the Video
Barry is blunt about where usable knowledge comes from. His own site states it without hedging: "We only learn from hands on experience."
He goes further. Some instructional material, in his view, comes from application companies chasing work, and it quietly holds back the parts that matter most. Decades of installing coatings handed him the failures as well as the successes, and the failures are the expensive half of the education. What he says he wants to do with that is straightforward: pass it on, prevent costly mistakes, and let applicators work with more confidence.
Anyone who has lost a weekend to a finish that behaved nothing like the sample board will recognise the value of that.
Lime Plasters, Friday at 9:00 AM
Barry opens the final day of Fine Finish Expo 2026.
Lime Plasters: History and Application Friday, October 9, 9:00 to 10:30 AM Followed by open question and answer
Friday is the Expo itself. Admission is free and it is restricted to people working in the field: decorative artists, painters, contractors, designers, students, apprentices and journeymen. The floor runs 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM with vendor tables from manufacturers and distributors, live demonstrations, two further lectures, and a hands-on area where you can try new plasters and take your sample boards home.
The question and answer is the part to stay for. Fifty years of answers, and the room gets to set the questions.
Full schedule, workshops and registration: www.idal.org/workshops
Follow Barry Affleck: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | plastersource.com
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