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would look until he finished. BRANDYWINE WEST
By Adam Zewe Staff Reporter
When Yorklyn-resident Bill Kulish looks at an empty driveway, he sees a blank canvas.
Kulish combines hi-tech concrete and his artistic mind to produce permanent works of art on driveways, walls and floors.
He owns a concrete resurfacing company called Quintechs and uses chemistry to create granite, marble or any other type of stone his client’s want to pave their driveways, surround their swimming pools or tile their bathrooms.
Kulish said he can use chemically-enhanced concrete to create rock in three days, while it takes millions of years for rock to be created naturally. Although he uses concrete everyday, Kulish said his work is much different than traditional paving.
“If a client can tell their driveway is concrete, I could have done a better job,” he said.
Kulish said he considers each stone or brick he creates a work of art and, even if he is working on a garage floor, he adds realistic details by hand. He charges about $8.50 a square
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foot to cover an average driveway
with concrete bricks, he said.
Kulish combines chemicals to
produce the concrete and adds
more chemicals to color it, but
said his work is as much art as it
is chemistry because he does not
have complete control over the
process.
Kulish is never completely sure
how the chemicals will react once
he combines them.
“This is one of the few mediums
where you are limited only by
your imagination,” he said.
“Sometimes, the process takes on
a creative energy. The chemicals
almost become like another hand
of the artist and kind of have a
life of their own.”
He has been oil painting for 35
years, but said he thinks concrete
is a freer medium because there
are unlimited colors and dozens of
different ways he can use
concrete.
Kulish created a concrete tabletop
inside his home using blue
pigments to resemble a Monet
painting and said he could not
have created the same colors
using oil paints. He said he enjoys
experimenting with pigments and
creating unique colors.
Kulish said he is fascinated by petrified wood, which is wood that has been fossilized, so he mixed pigments and concrete until he created an object that is reddish-brown with many small gouges, resembling a piece of petrified wood.
“It has the strength of stone with the fragility of nature and the warmth of wood,” he said.
He uses the petrified wood as a doorstop for his home in Yorklyn, which he said has become a canvas for his concrete art. He installed a concrete floor that resembles stone
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tile in his dining room and a brick wall made from concrete in his office.
He said he created the concrete wall by hand and intentionally put cracks and gouges in the brick so it would look like it was made 175 years ago when the house was built.
Kulish also created a concrete bathtub for his bathroom because he was curious about how it would turn out. The bathtub is functional and Kulish said using hi-tech concrete for bathroom fixtures makes sense because the substance is antibacterial, antifungal and water-resistant.
Experimentation is one of the best things about working with hi-tech concrete, said Kulish. He took a discarded giraffe statue, repaired it with concrete, sprayed it with a metal sealer and proudly displayed the statue in front of his home.
The statue has a coppery appearance that Kulish said he did not expect. He colored the statue at 2 a.m. and said he had no idea the statue would shine the way it does until he saw it in the daylight. The combination of chemicals and thickness of the concrete led to the coppery color, he said.
Kulish said his work gives him the ability to be creative, whether he is building a bathtub, paving a driveway or copying a 50-million-year-old piece of petrified wood.
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