commission a large painting

This is a print framed version of the image we commissioned the artist to paint on the bathroom wall.

This is what it looks like on the wall:

When we were trying to sell the house, a stager came in and went through the entire place with ideas of how to make it look its very best. She thought the nipple in the painting could be a problem. So I took artist chalk and drew the gown over the nipple.

If that seems bad, even worse is I’ve seriously thought of painting over the entire mural, and then putting up a glass tile mosaic. In fact, if I find NaNoWriMo doesn’t work out for me, I will do just that. If my honey agrees, and will do the part I can’t reach…

We had quite a bit of fun with the tile mosaic we did earlier.

Some years back, I had money to do fanciful things with. I had a large empty wall. It seemed the perfect opportunity to commission a large painting.

I picked out the artist, who does such things, and suggested that I wanted a Buddha in bamboo with a faint city skyline background, and the painting should be “Urban Oasis”.

The artist told me I was nuts. The painting would be way too intimidating, she said. It would look like it was going to come down on people, she insisted.

So I told her to go ahead and do the abstract Buddha she wanted to do for me. I pointed out the colors in the water outside, and asked her to think about those colors. She wanted to use the colors from inside the salt water aquarium beneath where the painting would go. OK, maybe both? She said she would go ahead and do color studies.

She came around several months later with some deep blue and purple color splotches on paint board. I thought, hmmm, those are really intense colors. But she insisted.

This saga continued over many months. Not surprisingly, the end result was that she did not want me to have the painting once it was finished. I did very much like the Buddha part, which was a small figure down in the blue, in the corner. There was however a very large five pointed white star up in the corner that reminded me of the star that was neither blue nor red from grammar school the teacher would put on your papers if you turned in something so-so. I had asked her to paint that out, which may have been why she did not want me to have the painting I had commissioned.

And I have a mural I commissioned on my bathroom wall. That is another story.

So, although I did commission a large painting, the end result is that in order to have art that does what I want for my wall, the better solution appears to have a triptych printed from my views of kelp. This is one kelp view.