On Receiving a Commission: A Conversation About Feeling

Every commission starts with someone saying "I want to capture this feeling" — and often, they don't have words for it beyond that. They'll describe a place, a person, a specific evening, and then trail off, as though the important part of what they mean lives somewhere language doesn't quite reach. My job, before I ever pick up a brush, is to listen until the image appears on its own.

I usually start a commission conversation by asking almost nothing about how the painting should look. I ask about the story instead. Where were you standing? What time of year was it? Was anyone with you, and were you talking, or was it quiet? People are often surprised by how little I ask about colour palettes or composition in that first conversation — but I've learned that if I understand the feeling precisely enough, the visual decisions tend to make themselves.

One of the commissions I think about often began with a woman telling me about a lake near her childhood home, and how she used to sit at its edge on nights she couldn't sleep. She didn't ask for a literal, accurate rendering of that lake — she'd have needed a photograph for that. She wanted the painting to hold the specific kind of stillness she felt sitting there at sixteen, unable to explain to anyone why she needed to be near water in the dark. That's not a brief you can satisfy with technical skill alone. You have to actually understand what she meant.

This is where being a slow, unhurried process serves the work rather than delaying it. I don't sketch until I've sat with a commission's story for at least a few days — sometimes longer. I want the feeling to settle before I let a single visual idea take hold, because the first image that occurs to me is often the most obvious one, and obvious isn't usually what someone means when they say a feeling is hard to put into words.

By the time I begin painting, I've usually stopped thinking about the commission as someone else's request and started thinking about it as a story I've been trusted with. That shift matters. A painting made to specification tends to look like it was made to specification — competent, but a little hollow. A painting made because you actually understood what someone was trying to say tends to hold something truer, even if it isn't a literal likeness of anything they described.

People sometimes ask if it's strange, painting other people's private memories for a living. It isn't, not really. It's closer to being handed something fragile and being asked to build a frame around it that won't let it fall. I take that seriously every time — and I'd rather spend an extra week listening than rush toward a version of the feeling that isn't quite true.