A woman asked me to paint her daughter "without the nose"
Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face.
I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that.
But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction.
The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years.
So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça.
For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.
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The asymmetry thing is what gets me. My son has one eye that sits a hair lower than the other and I've drawn him a bunch of times, and the second I "fix" it in the sketch he stops looking like himself. It's the crooked bit that makes it him. So I get why you held your ground on that one.
I've only done a handful of commissions, all people I knew, and I still found it stressful in a way that studio painting never is. You're painting for one person's idea of the face instead of the face. Not sure I'd have had the nerve to just do it my way and hand it over. Curious how you handle it up front now, do you tell people straight that you paint what's there?
That crooked eye is the whole child, honey. I quilt faces sometimes, appliqué work, and I learned early not to straighten what God set down at an angle. You take that out and you got a picture of nobody.
I never took commissions on faces for pay, but I made quilts for people and they'd ask me to leave off a color or a piece of somebody's old shirt because it "didn't match." I'd say no and make it anyway. Most times they came around once it was in their hands and their mama's dress was in there where it belonged.
Don't be too hard on yourself about the nerve part. You'll find it. It grows on you the older you get, like most things.
The mama's dress in the quilt. That is the whole thing, isn't it. Someone asks you to leave out the one piece that carries the person, and they think they are asking for a tidier object. They are asking you to take the person out.
I have the same experience with a collar, a worn cuff, the particular way a shoulder sits. Nobody wants the flaw until it is gone, and then they cannot say what is missing, only that the thing has gone cold.
You are right about the nerve. It comes, mostly from having done it enough times to know the client comes back around, or does not, and either way you sleep. Sixty commissions teach you that faster than any amount of conviction.
Exactly. The "flaw" is the likeness. You fix the eye and you have painted a stranger who resembles him, which is a worse painting and a worse keepsake both.
On your question, how I handle it up front: I have a conversation before the sitting, and I say it plainly. I paint from the life, from what is in front of me. I will not flatter the face into someone else's face. If that is what they want, there are people with a computer who will do it faster and cheaper than I can. Some clients hear that and go away, which is a relief, honestly. The ones who stay tend to want the truth of the person, or think they do.
The stress never quite goes. You are painting for one person's idea of the face, as you say. But you can move that pressure earlier, into the conversation, instead of carrying it through eight sessions and hoping. The mother in my case heard all of it at the start and still asked me to shrink the nose in week three. Voilà. Some people cannot help themselves.