Commissioning a Painting

I thought I would take this moment in time to write a little bit about how I do a commissioned painting whether it is a poetic realism composition, a simple portrait of a person or a pet, a complex narrative portrait, or something in between. 

"Plutarque"

"Portrait of a Young Poet"

"Toby with Jed and Bizzy" I love painting for an individual or family. It is a collaboration and most of my clients seem to enjoy the creative process. It can be a painting similar to my "Interior Dreams", "Animal Dreams" or a "Story from the Woods" series or it can be simply a landscape or a depiction of certain place that has meaning to the individual. It can also be a narrative portrait telling the story of an individual or family.  This concept is based on portraits from the Renaissance in which the artist depicted aspects about the life of the subject as well as a painted likeness.

The process can be completely virtual without me ever meeting with the subjects in person and when it is finished the painting will be shipped to the client. It starts with an email exchange in which I send a series of questions to get to know what the client is looking for in terms of the painting size, who or what is to be the subject of the painting, where the painting will be hung etc.

Once I have this information, we set up a phone call which could also be a facetime or a zoom meeting. And at this point I ask for a few photographs to be emailed or texted to me as beginning resource material. After that I start working up a composition. This is a small sketch on grid paper with written notations. I email the sketch to my client for changes or approval. When the composition is set, I often ask the client to take specific photos and email them to me, if necessary. Then I build the canvas using all archival materials and start drawing, then painting. If the client is interested in seeing the process, I am always happy to send photos as the painting develops.

I especially love painting a human with their four-legged best friend, or just the four-legged friend. Or all the four legged family members from a person's lifetime as in the last painting in this post called a "Lifetime of Animals.  Please feel free to contact me for more information and pricing.

Preliminary Sketch for "Shadow's Woods"

Final Painting "Shadow's Woods"

 

Preliminary Sketch for "Come for Drinks"

Final Painting "Come for Drinks"

Preliminary Drawing for "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

Final Painting "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

"A Gathering of Old Friends"

"Alfred on his Farm with Friends"

"Khaya and Sascha "

"A Lifetime of Animals"

                                       

Mending the Tigers

I just finished painting "Mending the Tigers". I have been working on it since March 9 when I last posted about it in progress. It has been almost three months. People often ask me how long it takes me to do a painting but I never keep track. So now I know. I guess keeping a blog is good in that respect. 

"Mending the Tigers", oil on linen, 4' x 5'

As I mentioned in my earlier post the idea came from a short story by Aimee Bender called Tiger Mending. It is a mesmerizing story so you should read it. It is in her collection called "The Color Master". Here is a link to her website http://aimeebender.com/.

I interpreted her story to have an environmental message. In my mind the tigers were coming out of the mountains to get help from humans. Their stripes falling off as symbolic of the fragility of this great beast in the modern world. The young woman mending the tigers represents the mindfulness, inventiveness and skill it is going to take for us as the responsible party to "mend" the environment. While she is the creative and the talent who has the ability to do the mending, her sister, leading the tigers in, is the facilitator-the person with the brain and resourcefulness to make things happen. 

(Note that this is my interpretation. There are others out there that focus on the relationship between the sisters). 

While I was preparing to do this painting  I looked at lots of paintings through art history that were about tigers both to see how they were handled by artists in terms of drawing and painting but also to see their place in art.  I went to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia to see Henri Rousseau's "Scout Attacked by a Tiger".  It is a brutal scene but Rousseau's vision is magical. They seem like mini figurines in long grass. The tiger's anatomy is a little odd but it makes for an enchanting painting. I hope the tiger came out on top of the situation, but Rousseau keeps us guessing. 

Eugene Delacroix was another great painter of tigers. I especially love his "Tiger Resting" which I also included in "Mending the Tigers", hanging above the Rousseau, and his beautiful watercolor and pencil study, simply called "Tiger". It is in the National Gallery.  I included it as a plate in the book in the right foreground- as if the young woman was studying it to see how to stitch the stripes back on. 

"Lake House, After the Storm"

I just recently completed a painting titled "Lake House, After the Storm".
It is a long canvas, 30 x 66 inches, oil on linen. I love working on this format as it lends itself to narrative and enables me to create a sequence of  events that tells what the beginning of the story is, (even if the catalyst for the narrative is outside the picture plane), what is happening in the picture plane, and what is likely to happen outside the picture plane on the other side.  The idea for this painting grew out of other images that I have been working on in the past few years - the floating room paintings like "Water Music" and "The Attraction of Fishing" as well as "Moon River" where the water is slowly wending its way into the interior.

"Water Music" 

"The Attraction of Fishing"

  

"Moon River"

I composed "Lakehouse"  using a series of arches to emphasize the right to left movement as well as to isolate the series of vignettes and images. I liked the idea of painting a room and then "flooding" it by glazing color over the floor plane.  I have always been fascinated by images of flooded rooms after natural disasters and how a room seems familiar but at the same time is rather disorienting.

The kernel of the idea for "Lake House" came to me one day when I was walking my dogs in a fundraiser for Best Friends Animal Society with Lucky Dog Rescue. For part of the walk I strolled beside a young man who told me that he first got into animal rescue after Hurricane Katrina. He was working for a company in the south, so he went to New Orleans to help. His job was to paddle around the flooded homes and pick up animals that were stranded. He said it was a very moving experience and he has been involved in animal rescue ever since. The image stayed in my head and even though I know his experience didn't look anything like this painting, the image was inspired by his story.

I tried to make the interior in this painting some what timeless with the classical columns and arches, and the fresco on the exterior wall. I wanted it to create an association for the viewer of ruins or a once beautiful place that is being threatened or destroyed, so the title "Lake House, After the Storm" is meant to evoke an association of the threat of global warming on our environment.

Here are some images of the process:

Graphite study for composition and light

Underpainting in grisaille on gessoed linen

First glaze or "imprimatura"  over the underpainting

Image where some of the interior and the floor plane are in

The finished painting

 (click on it to enlarge the image)

The Remains of the Day

In "The Remains of the Day" the hero returns from a very long day at work, to find that he has been away so long, a large tree has grown in his living room. His little terrier looks at  him as if to say "Sorry, but there was nothing I could do to prevent this".  He decides to make  the best of the remains of his day, so he strips down to his boxers, makes himself a scotch, and climbs up to the roof terrace to relax.  It is the story of the "everyman". In literature  and drama, the term everyman has come to mean an ordinary individual, with whom the audience or reader is supposed to be able to identify easily, and who is often placed in  extraordinary circumstances. The three panels that make up the triptych are each 18" high by 24" wide.

Here is the preliminary sketch for the panels-graphite on paper