How Does Your Garden Grow?

I am a painter.  I am very com­fort­able with the media I chose to work in, which has been acrylic paint­ing over the last decade or so.  That does not mean I do not know how to paint with oils, water­col­ors etc. merely that I have set­tled down to a medium that makes me happy.

I’ve painted a great many dif­fer­ent things over the years: Ani­mals, por­traits, land­scapes, flo­ral paint­ings, but over time my thoughts have become more and more abstract. These days my fin­ger­print involves birds, binary & Fibonacci spi­rals.   I can still paint a land­scape or pet por­trait, but that sub­ject mat­ter no longer rep­re­sents my artis­tic fin­ger­print.  How­ever, any one of these gen­res sells bet­ter than my cur­rent body of work does, at least in Phoenix AZ.

Nevertheless, times are tough and I can still paint a decent land­scape, crit­ter pic­ture, still life or what have you and I can be proud of the result. What can I say? I love painting. Some purists would say I am sell­ing out by tak­ing com­mis­sions, that I am com­pro­mis­ing my vision.  To those peo­ple I say, that the moment I expect some­one else to buy what I have cre­ated, the con­ver­sa­tion has started.  The work is no longer just about me, it’s also about my audi­ence, what they think and want. As for me, I am happy some­one is embrac­ing my vision, hav­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, and inter­ested in some­thing that is orig­i­nal, not just a print or trinket.

I have no prob­lem tak­ing on com­mis­sions as long as the per­son desir­ing the com­mis­sion can give me a clear idea of what they want, and if the com­mis­sion is some­thing I feel com­fort­able doing.  One thing I am never com­fort­able doing is copy­ing some­one elses work; it comes up more often than you might think.

I lis­ten to what the client says they want, get a non-refundable deposit up front, and then do a small-scale ren­der­ing.  The non-refundable deposit is a great fil­ter for weed­ing out peo­ple who really are not seri­ous about what they want. Doing a draft sketch takes time & buy­ing sup­plies cost money; I see no rea­son to bear the bur­den of costs when I am doing a commission. I am also not bash­ful about my prices.  I am wary of client who makes major changes from prior discussions; my response is some­thing like, “sure I can do that, but you real­ize that is an entirely dif­fer­ent paint­ing, not this paint­ing.”  If we can’t agree, I end the com­mis­sion, because I rec­og­nize a per­son who can’t artic­u­late to me what they want is never going to be happy with the result.

My most recent project was a com­mis­sion of a slightly dif­fer­ent kind.  The patron loves his gar­den.  Ear­lier in the year, I blew him away with some gar­den markers.

Now some might have balked at a noth­ing com­mis­sion like this, and quite frankly if I was a lot busier I prob­a­bly would not have done it, but I wasn’t, so I took on this wee lit­tle project that only took me a few hours to do. Besides, it was fun. I did such a good job that it lead to another com­mis­sion, The McWhort­er­ville Water Tower Project. Les­son one, if you take on a project, any project, do a good job-you never know where it might lead.

As I said, this guy loves his gar­den; he is installing a cis­tern, but the tank was a bor­ing black fiber­glass thing.  Given the AZ sun, the first require­ment was to paint it in light col­ors.  Sec­ondly, he wanted it to look like a water tower.  It was a big­ger project, so yes I did a con­cep­tual sketch, so he could decide if he liked my idea or not.  I did advise him it would be more painterly than the sketch I produced.

Once I had approval, includ­ing spelling of that name, I had to deal with the fact that acrylic paint might work OK on this fiber­glass tank, but enamel was prob­a­bly a bet­ter choice.  That is where hav­ing a range of skills, even dusty ones, comes into play.  I already knew that I could go oil-based paint on water-based paint but not the other way around.  I already knew I needed to scuff up and prime the tank before I could start paint­ing.  I also had to dust off my long dor­mant rat­tle can skills to accom­plish this project.  There­fore, after three days the client saw this…

…and was very happy.  Now we are talk­ing about farm-like murals on his 50-foot long fence. I see me paint­ing chick­ens in my future; I can sink my artis­tic teeth into that.   :o)

Jake
Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!
The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog.  The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights.  You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.