When I first started taking commissions, it felt uncomfortable. Almost exploitative. I could make a painting in my free time, using maybe £20 of materials, and charge far more than that felt like it should be worth. It didn’t sit right. The creative act wasn’t really the point of the transaction. The money was.
But I’ve come around on this. Art, for me, has always been about expressing ideas I can’t fully get across in words. Commission work is more transactional than that, obviously. But it’s also a kind of service. To the person commissioning it, and in a small way to culture itself. It’s a way of showing someone that beauty can turn up in more places than they expected, including the things and people they already love.
There’s an economics lesson in here that most artists don’t like admitting to. Most of us want to be the ones supplying the art we believe in, art we’d make regardless of whether anyone wants it, and then hope the world eventually catches up. Very few artists are actually willing to meet demand as it exists. I used to think that made commissions a compromise. Now I think it’s just a different, equally honest way of connecting what someone wants with what I can actually make. Which is really just another way of helping people out.
I don’t think George minded paying for his portrait more than he valued having it. That’s the balance I want every commission to hit.
That said, I don’t want to be naive about the market either. There’s a strange split in the art world. On one side, conceptual work selling for enormous sums, partly because scarcity and being removed from the average viewer get treated as virtues in themselves. On the other side, a glut of quick, cheap commission work, a lot of it on places like Etsy, priced so low it barely covers the artist’s time, let alone the years it took to get good. I sit somewhere in the middle, and deliberately so. When people tell me I should raise my prices to match the scarcity model, paint less, charge more, the way certain well known painters have been told to do, I understand the logic. I just don’t fully want it.
Part of that is knowing I’m rambling all this into a voice recorder for an AI to sort out, instead of locking myself in a room and painting until the world eventually notices, the way Goya more or less did. I don’t want to disappear into obscurity waiting to be discovered after I’m gone. I want to make work now, for people now. The person who only gets to a gallery once or twice a year, who sees a £100 or £150 painting on their wall and privately feels like it’s priceless. That’s the audience I actually want.
If that’s you, if you’ve got a photo you love and you’re wondering where you’d even start looking for someone to paint it, that’s exactly the kind of commission I want to do. Have a look at Oil Painted Portraits, Trois Crayon Portraits, or Pet Portrait Commissions, or just come and have a coffee about it.
Read more from the studio:
George Baker and His Dad · On Pet Portraits · On The Rite of Spring