When Olivia Maxton and her family move to Johannesburg later this month, the first thing she plans to hang on the wall is a watercolor of the house they are leaving on Guernsey, in the Channel Islands.
That artwork, done by Aurelie Baudry Palmer of London, is a house and family portrait done in 2020 when the Maxtons were just a family of three (the couple had a second child this year). “It meant a lot to us, this house,” Ms. Maxton said, “it was our first family home, so I wanted it eternized.”
The painting captured the young family in Ms. Baudry Palmer’s whimsical style, which also was evident in a drawing of Westminster Abbey that the artist did for a 2022 holiday concert invitation at the request of Catherine, Princess of Wales. But the Maxtons’ drawing also included a cherry blossom tree that Ms. Maxton’s father gave her before he died. It is something she cannot move to South Africa, so, she said, “just the attention to detail, that just meant a lot.”
Ms. Maxton was so pleased with the piece that she asked the artist to do watercolors of her sister’s home in Stockholm and her mother’s home in South Africa, which she gave to them as presents. Those gifts, she said, created a kind of special artistic link among the three of them. “My sister and my mom were in tears when they received them,” she said, “because they were so spot on.”
As Ms. Maxton and others who have given customized art know, having a piece that captures a moment in time is a special present. And in an age when almost anyone, even those without artistic talent, can use artificial intelligence, apps or graphic design packages to create images, there is something truly special about commissioning an artist to create what could become an heirloom.
“Rather than being limited by the constraints of a particular app or a preset series of filters, the commissioned artist brings together their specialisms and lived experience,” Chantal Faust, the interim dean at the School of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art in London, wrote in an email.
“A customized work of art is deeply personal in that sense,” she wrote, “serving as a form of self-expression realized in collaboration with an artist who helps bring that expression to life.”
Commissioned portraiture, of course, has been around for centuries and has long been a way to show affection. During the Renaissance, prosperous merchants would pay for works to immortalize themselves or family members, elevating their positions in society. Arguably one of the most famous is Leonardo DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa,” which is believed to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini commissioned by her husband, the Florentine cloth merchant Francesco del Giocondo.
Over the centuries both artistic tastes and methods have changed, but the human desire to capture someone or something personal in art has not. “Even people who are not creatives or they’re not artists understand that a piece of artwork has value in itself, not money value,” said Mariko Jesse, an illustrator who works in Hong Kong, London and California, “but the fact that it’s a one-off thing that is different than just buying something that everybody can have.
“I really like knowing that this is an actual painting or drawing that somebody has made, rather than it’s just manufactured or commercially printed.” She has done work for Tiffany & Company and the River Cottage cookbook series and her commissioned prices start at about $1,000.
Now many artists and illustrators frequently work from photographs rather than in-person visits or sittings, a practice that would make giving the gift of a custom piece quite easy for a receiver in some other location. “It’s very instantaneous,” said Ms. Baudry Palmer, whose fees start at 350 pounds ($455). “I give them my phone number and they send photos over WhatsApp. I do my sketches, ask for feedback and we take it from there.”
Patrick Markel, a Canadian artist who specializes in landscapes, also uses photographs, but notes that conversations about the work are important, too. “We generally start with the location and then go through my portfolio and discuss elements of my work they like,” he wrote in an email. “From there we cover more general details like the season, weather and overall mood of the painting. Then it is in my hands to take their input and create.” His pieces, which range from 500 to 20,000 Canadian dollars ($360 to $14,390), can take anywhere from a day or a month to complete.
Three months is the work period that Leon Fenster, a London artist, cites for what he describes as dreamscapes: a collage-style mélange of intricate hand drawn and painted elements, including faces and familiar items. His pieces are at least a meter by a meter (almost 3.3 feet by 3.3 feet) and range between $15,000 and $20,000.
He begins by spending at least a half a day with his subjects, talking about their lives and asking questions that range from what kind of games they enjoy playing to where they spent recent vacations.
“One of the philosophies behind this is to try and depict the world the way we remember in our memories and dreams,” he said, sitting in a cafe near JW3, also known as the Jewish Community Center London, which is exhibiting his nine-story outdoor mural on the history of the city’s Jewish community. “It’s stripping out chronology, stripping out geography. All these little individual episodes are tangentially related to each other and arrive at us like a vast memory palace.”
Carolyn Wu, who along with her husband hired Mr. Fenster to do a piece for them in the 2010s when they all were based in Beijing, agreed with his sentiment. “We were blown away by the details and continue to find Easter eggs to this day, years later, that we hadn’t seen before,” she wrote in an email. “Many of our friends, a lot who also left China, commissioned pieces to commemorate this incredible expat experience where many of our children were born and our careers grew.”
Not every piece is an immediate success, of course. Mr. Markle once did a painting of Mt. Rundle in Canada’s Banff National Park, but the recipient, the wife of a client in Maine, didn’t like the winter setting: “He shipped it back to me and I made them a spring Rundle, which was much more loved.”
And selecting an artist whose style meshes with that of the gift receiver is important, said Samantha Morris, an illustrator in London who said commissions represent about a quarter of her work. “I think people like what I am doing, the sense of humor, and they think, ‘Oh, you might be the right person to realize my vision or my picture,’” she said. “I need to know a lot about what the person is looking to achieve.”
In the case of Ms. Maxton, she loved the watercolor of her house so much, she already has commissioned Ms. Baudry Palmer to do a piece that shows her family as a foursome at their new home in South Africa.
And when asked if she also was planning to ask the artist to do a painting of her mother’s new home in Nairobi, Kenya, she laughed and said, “Yes, probably. I have a bit of an addiction.”
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