Working with the Artist: Commissions/Consultations

One of the things I like best about pure abstract art is that each time I look at a painting I can and usually do see or feel something different. When I talk with collectors and others viewing my work they often point out things that I had not seen nor intended but am often thrilled and grateful to them for their sharing their views of my work.  I would have never had the opportunity to see and experience the richness of their experience if I had not had the opportunity to hear their comments at the time they were viewing the painting.  Unless the artist is already famous, most people prefer to know or know something about the artist and to have some sort of personal interaction to make the art more personally theirs.  These thoughts have led me to do more personal consultations and/or commissions as part of my work. 

As an example of this process, I would like to share my first experience in doing this sort of collaboration between myself as artist and the collector.  I had one of my paintings (Genesis) in the Woodshop Gallery in Honomu, Hawaii.  The owners of the Gallery, Peter and Jeanette McLaren, liked it very much.  They were in the process of building their home on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island and had some big walls on which they wanted to place some original art by an artist they knew and liked.  They talked with me about splitting Genesis into 3 panels 40x54 inches each, to hang horizontally and another canvas into 3 panels 40x60 inches they wanted to hang vertically.  I took my lap top computer and my Cintiq screen out to their home to show them what the panels would look like before they made a decision to order them.  It was a very enjoyable and mutually creative process.  I showed them the 3 Genesis panels on my Cintiq but since they are so big I had to scroll around to show them all the panels; then I decreased the size so that they could see all 3 panels side by side on the computer screen.  We all agreed they would look wonderful once printed, framed and painted on top of the digitized canvas to add back more real rich texture and make them truly one of a kind paintings. 

I showed them the other three panels I had increased in size and we all agreed they just didn’t look very good at the increased size.  We continued to talk and I pulled up the original Genesis on my Cintiq and was scrolling around on the canvas when Jeanette saw a corner of the painting she liked and asked me what it would look like if I cropped it and made that corner into a 40x80 inch image.  I cropped and resized the image in Photoshop and it was beautiful. We all really liked it and they decided to make it the 4th painting to go on a long thin wall in their home. 

That is one of the wonderful things about abstract digitized art.  If you see one part of a painting and wonder what that part might look like if increased in size it can be done instantly.  If you lived on the Big Island I could come to your home and we could jointly select or view different parts of my paintings to see if there were something you might like to have made as a unique painting for your home.  There are so many interesting parts of each abstract painting the options for creating unique new paintings are vast.   Unfortunately, if you’re not on the Big Island, I couldn’t come to your home but we could do the same process (to a much more limited degree in terms of spontaneous suggestions back and forth) via email.  If you see a part of a painting you like and wonder what it would look like if enlarged, you could email me your request and I could either email you back with a low resolution JPG file or up load it to my web site.  If you like the enlarged image you could then order your own unique one of a kind painting (enhnaced digitized canvas to add texture).  Costs would depend on size and whether you wanted it framed or shipped as a rolled canvas.