4x5 Residential Painting

From time to time I will take a commission to do a residential painting - and this one was the biggest one I've had the pleasure of doing. The canvas was 4 x 5 feet and easy swallowed up my drawing table. My little arms could barely stretch the brush to the top.

When I make a painting for someone's home I ask a lot of questions - what colors do you like? What color is the wall it's going on? What are some other artists or paintings that you enjoy? And always, I ask them for "mood words" which is usually the most helpful aspect. These "mood words" help me to know the desired feel for the painting to embody. Any time I make someone a painting the goal is to make something beautiful and to make for them what they want and will be happy with. It's their painting after all. The mood words I got for this project were "Chagall-like", "celestial", "wistful", and "luminous".

Being that Marc Chagall was referenced, in the thumbnail I made some surreal jumps - think of his floating maidens and dreamy abstracted pastoral scenes. These are the thumbnails that were not chosen (wacky as they are, I really like the bottom right drawing):

These weren't what we were looking for though. It was looking at Marc Chagall's stained glass windows that got the painting going in the right direction:

With all the questions asked, a proper thumbnail drawn up, and a couple of weeks and layers of paint, here is the end-product (and some close-ups):