I got a commission! Yay!!

Most emails I get from the contact page on my website are spam. So I was really excited when I discovered a message from a woman right here in Des Moines who had found my website while looking for an artist to hire. She sent me some images, described her situation, and invited me to her house for a look at the space.

We instantly clicked over a bottle of champagne. Two hours flew by as we went from talking about art to travel, family, books we're reading, and many other topics. Learning about Tracy and her husband helped me come up with ideas for the personal objects in their paintings.

The couple wanted two narrow, vertical canvases to fit their space. Tracy liked the circular patter and tie in The Escape (the header image for my website). They had a very specific color scheme in mind--right down to a paint chip! I picked up the chip and got to work.

First, I sent them several sketches so they could see what I had in mind and make suggestions of their own.

They selected the top left image and the top right one, with modifications. I wanted the paintings to be meaningful to them, and purposely did them with a "His and Hers" theme. Tracy is a writer and enjoys music, and her husband is a lawyer who wears a suit to work daily. He would have liked an object added to the painting to memorialize a pet, but it didn't seem to fit. (I managed to sneak something in later.)


The ideas for the chosen images came from my own desk and a chair I saw at Pittock Mansion in Portland this summer. The ottoman was one from the Grant Wood house at 1142 in Iowa City.

After discussing the changes the couple wanted to see, I adjusted the final sketches and put them on canvas. At this point I hadn't quite got my studio situation figured out and was working in the tiny dining area in the kitchen of my efficiency apartment. I sacrificed eating at a table until these paintings were finished!

I started mixing colors according to the paint chip, which was far from my usual bright palette. Balancing the strongly vertical compositions and reigning in my urge to add more color were the biggest challenges in these pieces.

It took me a long time to realize the value of an underpainting. For most of my college classes I was in such a hurry to finish by the deadline that I would try to get the color and detail right in the first layer of paint and move on to the next area. After spending part of a summer doing ONLY underpaintings for my professor John Dilg, it finally sunk in that there was a better approach. Now, I try to cover the entire canvas in a layer of paint right away and work up to the colors and textures as I add more layers of paint to the surface.

As I was working on these paintings I got a message from Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure, a local coffee shop. In 2009 while interning in DSM, I had apparently put my name on a wait-list for showing work at the shop. I still don't remember doing that, but I have to thank past Molly for her foresight! I'll be showing there in November of 2012.

I haven't done many commissioned paintings, and I struggled with how to make them meaningful to me as well as to the couple. When making work for sale, it's tempting to watch TV while you paint since it seems all the decisions have already been made. I didn't want that to be the case--I wanted to make something that still had significance in my body of work. Obviously the change in color palette was a learning experience, and the furniture with objects representing the couple fit in with my usual themes. But how to make it personal?

The relationships, of course. The connection I felt with Tracy throughout the project as we communicated with emails, had meetings in person, and shared ideas. The new friendship made in a new city. And, in this case, the idea that someone who never met me was moved by my work! There is even more to come from this couple next month.

Here are the finished paintings. See below for images of both from start to finish.

Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon. Oregon. Oregon. I wasn’t on vacation anymore when we reached that damp green state. I was auditioning new lives.

The journey was fabulous: Freedom from obligation, freedom to stay or leave, to drive or gawk, get up early or sleep late. It was a necessary holiday. We had been on the road for two weeks and each new place was amazing, but each confirmed that life in Iowa was, for me, a better option.

An idyllic picture of Oregon has been building in my mind since my last trip west, made prettier and more enticing by dark Iowa winters. Ocean, mountains, waterfalls, trees and moss and green green green! So what if it rains? I’ll stay inside and read a book. (In fact, the first rain drop in the two weeks we’d been travelling came down in OR.) I don’t have the words to describe its natural beauty, so thank goodness for digital cameras.

Our first experience in Oregon was the University in Eugene. I dragged my sister to Berkeley and Davis the week before, which felt more like doing a duty than discovering a potential future. The UO was immediately different (but maybe that was just my Oregon utopia bias). I loved the campus and the graduate painting studios in an old building with enormous windows and character.

The people we met in Oregon helped its cause, too. More ‘strangers’ let us spend a few days in their home on the Northwest side of Portland, in exchange for feeding, petting and pilling their entertaining cast of Belgian tail-less cats and walking their sweet dog. We were guided to Powell’s, the Portland Art Museum, the good restaurants on 23rd Street (can’t remember names), and the best wine at the co-op (Casal Garcia Rose Wine—that I can remember).

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Thanks again to kind friends of friends, we spent the summer solstice in a cozy cabin on the side of breathtaking Mount Hood...

...but we loved Portland so much that we decided to go back for more.

Round two brought us to OMSI (and their Chronicles of Narnia exhibit!!), the historic Pittock Mansion, the International Rose Test Garden in full bloom, every open gallery in the Pearl, and on a hike with sweet Sadie through a maze of trails in the hilly woods behind our temporary home on Aspen Avenue. We started to plan our next trip to Oregon, which we imagined would be a more permanent situation and which involved us earning a living by bike taxi-ing people and selling ads on the back of our three wheeled bike cab. Just until Emily gets a job at Powell’s and I get hired at PAM.

I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent thinking about what Oregon presented. It’s not easy stuff. Live there? Sure, in a heartbeat. Never pump my own gas again? Yes, please! Move across a country and live hours and hours from my family? Start all over, again?! Big girl decisions. I could postpone them, though, because luckily I was still on vacation.