The Questions Keep Changing

It’s Labor Day. 

Many people get the day off but that does not feel like a luxury I can afford. For the first time in my career I have more work than I know what to do with. 

My personal work has been on the back burner for months as I work on one commission after another trying to help people bring their ideas to life. 

Its one of my favorite parts about being an artist. The trust that’s given to me by others to work on their behalf. 

Earlier in my career I saw commissions as necessary evil. Obstacles that needed to be overcome so I could continue working on what I wanted to work on. 

I’ve always got ideas brewing and when you are forced to push them aside they start to build up and overwhelm. 

But over the last few years something changed. Commissions now feel like personal work and I don’t know if that’s because of the level of trust I’ve built with people but I find myself more and more invested in other people’s stories. 

The people they love become people I love. 

The ideas that are important to them become important to me. 

Instead of seeing a hurdle, I find myself excited to continue the work. 

My work. 

I helped a grandmother write love letters to each of her grandchildren and capture their personalities in her words to them. 

The portraits are all linked and feel like a body of work but each shines as an individual as well. The first one was difficult. It was a test because I’d never painted a color word portrait for anyone but myself. 

Up until that moment they’d all been experiments. 

The second one I had to up the ante so to speak. I figured out how I could get more detail out of my paints by twisting my brushes certain ways, adding more medium to the paints to increase their viscosity. 

With this came more transparency in the paint and I started to figure out how to change my application to consider the transparency instead of fighting it. 

In trying to capture personality I was able to experiment with how loose I could paint which revealed more technical ideas that I could work with. 

The final painting is my favorite but it was also nearly effortless. 

In the two years we worked on the project together I was working on personal projects all the while, experimenting and playing and finding better ways to do the work I love to do. 

The personal work fed the commissions.

The commissions fed the personal work.

I’m not sure there’s much of a difference anymore.

I was recently asked to create a portrait of Sophia Loren. I’ve been working on it for several weeks. It's the largest portrait I’ve ever done. 

But it also feels like the best work I’ve ever done. 

For this one the client wanted black and white, the classic Hollywood feel. She offered a ton of words and quotes and ideas and I’ve enjoyed working all of them into this discovery of Sophia. 

I’ve written every quote so many times I can ramble them off at will now. 

My favorite so far is, “Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires an avid faith in yourself.”

When I write that, I don’t feel like I’m writing someone else’s words. It feels more like a mantra. It feels like the things I used to say to myself every day when I was struggling to fight off feelings of failure and self-doubt. 

It takes me on a personal journey of struggle and conquest. Of pushing ahead even when it didn’t know the road before me. 

Trusting the process when I felt lost and alone. 

But also pushing myself to be better. Finding new ways to tell my story and reinvent this idea of capturing a person. 

Because the reality is I could have just kept doing these the same way and people would be impressed. The first ones I ever did impressed people. Hell, they impressed me even! 

Like, how did I even do this? I still look at my Hunter S. Thompson portrait with wonder. There is something special in that portrait. But it was a stepping stone, its no longer my best. But its special and it tells my story. 

I think each of these are telling my story and its a story of an artist driven by the need to understand who we are and why we’re here. 

There are times that I want to believe that those questions don’t matter to me anymore. That they were questions for a young man struggling to figure out who he was and wanted to be. 

But I think they’re at the core of my work. 

I think the biggest difference is that I’m ok not knowing the answer. But the question is one I just keep asking because its just so interesting. 

I know that I could have constructed Sophia like the last one I’d done but in doing that there is a feeling that I’m not being true to myself. If I simply rest on my laurels then it means I’ve stopped asking the question. 

What makes me me? Why am I here? 

My goal is that the viewing experience will change multiple times for the audience. 

In the past it was the distance view that looked real and the close-up revealing the words but now we have layers and layers of words that are visible from different distances. 

It makes me think about the future. 

About how I’m going to outdo this and level up and push the idea one step further…

I don’t quite know yet.

That’s the fun part. 

It’s Labor Day.

And I feel incredibly blessed to be working today. 

Exploring, creating and questioning.