Friday, September 10, 2010

House Portraits

Do real artists paint house portraits?
This artist does.
I can either visit your home to sketch and photograph it,
or I can work from your photographs. Here are some examples of my house portraits:
I sometimes like to paint a house at dusk when the lights come on inside. This is the house my cousin and her family lived in for several happy years. They are planning to build a zero energy home and  they wanted to have a portrait of the home they loved so much. The new owner also loved the house portrait and they purchased a high resolution digital print.



I met the owner and saw this house in the summer but felt it would work well as a winter portrait. The owners collect house portraits of all the places they have lived. They bid on the chance to have me paint a house portrait of their home at a fundraiser for Fox Chapel Crew Club.



This was a going away present from one family to another. I am guesing the parents and children had some great memories together in each other's homes.




This was my most recent house portrait. The young children of the family were seated on kitchen stools waiting to see the painting of their home. Their mom opened the cardboard portfolio while I watched and it was such a pleasure to see their faces light up with pleasure when they saw it!

I work in many different ways and I am comfortable with the mix of work. I recently enjoyed this piece in the NY Times  about Wayne Thiebaud who has worked in many areas of both applied and fine arts even if most people know him for only his paintings of pastries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/arts/design/03wayne.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=wayne_thiebaud

One part of the  long article which gets at what I mean is this..."Mr. Thiebaud’s original aim was to be a commercial artist, a field he deeply respects. (“I still paint as if an art director is looking over my shoulder,” he said.) Over the years, he has worked a sign painter, a theatrical production designer, an art director, a poster designer, a fashion typographer and illustrator (his subjects included lipstick and shoes), a comic strip artist, a cartoonist for the Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles and, fleetingly, as a teenage “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios filling in the figures of Dopey, Pluto and Jiminy Cricket."



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