It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Wednesday. At a Midtown Manhattan hotel, Anthony Chase paints by lamplight while his two freelance employees put on their jackets, call it a day and leave the construction site.

Chase, 56, a native of South Africa and former filmmaker and DJ, runs a small plastering business in midtown Manhattan that specializes in luxurious finishes, known as Venetian plaster. In the past, he spent most of his work hours simply supervising his freelance workers. Now, as the hotel job shows, he has had to shoulder more work on his own. He has also been forced to accept commonplace lower-paying jobs to keep the business running.

His high-end business nosedived during the recession because wealthy clients became jittery and held off on costly decoration. Now, after enjoying a trendy Manhattan lifestyle complete with country house and sailboat, Chase is cutting expenses, digging into his savings and often just painting walls – happy to have any work to cover the bills.

“A lot of architectural projects just stopped or dried up,” he says, referring to the housing market slump. “Some of the young dot-com guys had me doing jobs in Greenwich Village. I needed the contract and, pfft.” Chase tosses his hands to signify the recession. “They pulled the plug.”

In the good years, large, lucrative projects filled his days, demonstrating the allure of the surfaces he was able to produce with a special mix of pigment and marble dust. In 2002, for example, he worked on a 27,000-square-foot mansion in Centre Island, N.Y. with a $170,000 budget for the decorative painting alone.

“Somehow,” he says, “I’ve not had as many big projects recently. Besides being really slow, in the last six months, I’ve been grabbing at tiny little projects.”

Anthony Chase Studio was incorporated in 1994, ten years after Chase emigrated from Cape Town to New York City. It brought in $144,000 gross commissions in 2009 compared to $199,000 the year before. Chase’s salary this past year was about $70,000 compared to $150,000 in a better year, 2005.

Lately, Chase says, he does “more bidding and less getting.” This year, he made 25 bids and got only 15 jobs. He even does basic painting jobs. In October, he painted his landlord’s bathroom ceiling for $350.

The recession soured his sweet lifestyle as well, forcing him to start biking to work instead of paying for parking and clean his studio himself instead of using a professional service. He has also cut down on traveling with his wife, Nini Ordoubadi, 48, a native of Iran who blends and sells tea in upstate New York under the TAY TEA label.

“That really depresses us,” she says. “Ant, I call him Indiana Jones, he really loves to travel.” In the good days, they traveled to Morocco and sailed in the Greek Islands in addition to visiting their respective families in Iran and South Africa.

But Ordoubadi says they can’t blame it all on the recession. “We’re not based on Excel spreadsheets,” she says. “We’re upside-down artists who pretend to make money.…We’ve always done stupid and foolish things.”

In 2005, they bought a five-bedroom old farmhouse in Andes, N.Y., a small town in the Catskills. “We bought it in a period of euphoria,” Chase says. “Nini and I had just gotten married. It was a folly, but we love it.” Nine years ago, Chase also bought a 36-foot Nelson-Marek Morgan cruiser, called “Salomé.”

All these expenses stretched their budget thin, Chase says. They pay $7,000 a month to maintain their upstate house, their rented Manhattan studio and their sailboat. Chase was forced to borrow about $3,000 a month from a Chase Bank business line of credit for the past year.

“I’m anticipating a number of years of hard work to dig out of this,” he says.

Chase has been struggling to pay the bills, Ordoubadi says. “He’s a pretty even-keeled guy, but I could feel it,” she says. “He’s a little more run down.”

“Buying a boat, was that smart?” asks Ordoubadi. “No. Starting blending tea in my mid-40s, was that smart? Interesting yes, but smart: I don’t know.…It’s just who we are.”

In November 2008, the couple started renting out their upstate home for an average of $1,200 a weekend. He and his wife won’t consider selling it for now, though. Ordoubadi says she’s “glued” to Andes because her tea-blending business is based there, and the couple enjoys gardening there and caring for their two goats, Marcel and Rausch, named after artists Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

“We’re just holding onto it,” Chase says.

Looking ahead, he and his wife are optimistic. “I think this time will pass,” she says, “and if not we’ll go to plan B and find a solution.” As a lifetime freelancer, Chase says he believes he’ll find ways to adapt to future challenges. “I can change gear quite easily,” he says. “I’m ready to delve into new areas or whatever it takes.”