Commission Catalogue
I finished two painting commissions earlier this year. While it is an honour to be commissioned to create a piece of art for someone’s home, commissions are double-edged swords. They are fun and ultimately expanding, but also hard and incredibly challenging. The very nature of art (and life) itself.
Apart from my high school years, where my easel stood in a room with ten to twenty others (all of us kids painting! why did we hate school so much? dumb rules. girls only. school uniforms. singing hymns in assembly), I’m used to painting in a room alone. The great thing about this is, if it sucks, it doesn’t matter. I can just paint over it and try again.
Commissions make me accountable. They involve a timeline, pricing, and a creative expectation, no matter how loose. Being paid to paint (in advance), legitimises the whole endeavour, making the whole process a lot scarier. Commissions force me to wade through my worst thoughts about my abilities, my art, and my self. (What am I doing? Why am I doing it? I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t do it. This is all trash.) But the payoff for doing them is big. Why? The money is pretty OK, but the best part is learning to wrangle the stubborn, disbelieving, and annoying aspects of myself that like to chime in when things get tough. I can be my worst critic but also my best coach. When I feel like I can’t do it, I’ve learned to tell myself: This is exactly how you should feel. You haven’t made anything great without feeling this way. Keep going. You’ll figure it out.
Another great perk is making something really cool for someone that I like a lot. I just got back from a long overdue visit to the States and in just about every home I visited was a piece of my art. I love knowing that people I love like what I make enough to hang it on their walls. I just about always forget that I have sold or gifted a piece of art to someone, and when I see it in their house I am overjoyed all over again.
Sawgrass, Mangrove, Orchid
This commission was for a friend I hadn’t connected with since high school and I really wanted to get it right! The timeline was extended while I moved, undertook and finished a masters programme, and moved again, but ultimately, I think I was really scared about whether I could paint something beautiful for my very talented and creative friend. All kinds of feels came up in the process, but with some honest conversation and a lot of love and understanding, we collaboratively got there in the end.
The abstract nature of paintings like this make them really hard to pin down. Trying to encapsulate a place, a feeling, or a connection in colour and abstract form alone is a big ask any day of the week. I started with an image of an alligator in mind and was more than happy to see the mood and colour of a thunderstorm over the Everglades emerge as part of the final iteration. I enjoyed the challenges of this piece almost as much as the successes for how much I felt they contributed to my growth as a friend, artist, collaborator and human.
Banks Peninsula / Akaroa
Slightly smaller but similar in colour and tone (a little moodier, a little more form), this piece was done for another wildly talented and creative marine scientist friend. I had no concept in mind when I started her piece, which is, honestly, how I begin a lot of my paintings. Painting for me is free form. It’s a place I can go without big concepts or ideas and just throw colour down and see what happens. Sometimes there’s an emotion I’m stuck on, sometimes an idea I want to explore, but more often than not, I just feel a pressure building, get myself to a canvas and go.
I spent five weeks with this friend in Akaroa / Banks Peninsula back in 2019, launching the boat whenever wind and rain allowed, on effort to study the Hector’s dolphin. They were some of the best five weeks of my life. I built up a lot of layers on this piece before the landscape of Banks Peninsula started to form, much to my surprise. I honed in to bring out the natural colours and curves of the peninsula, thinking all the while of our time motoring slowly past coves and coastlines in search of dolphins.
Archipelago
Detail.
This commission was for my lovely friend Kate West. I met Kate in Tonga on a whale-swimming trip with Matt Draper. We were both entranced by the humpbacks and came back again the following year. We’ve become good friends, and in the years since, I’ve met her in Sydney and Byron Bay, and had her over to NZ for a visit. She and her family are hoping to visit Leigh later this year.
Kate specified the size she wanted and let me have at it. Like me, she loves the ocean. Kate is a warm, special creature, emitting a sort of soft, pale blue light from within. I love being around her. I wanted to paint her something to remember Tonga by, that might also reflect her warm presence to imbue her with the same good feelings she offers to those around her.
Without much thought or planning, I started painting the pale blue and turquoise crystalline waters of one very special day on our second whale-swimming trip, where we swam for hours with a mother and calf over shallow coral heads, Vava’u’s outer islands glimmering in the distance.
Wanaka
We’re going back in time a little bit now! Rewind to my years in Dunedin working at Cutlers and painting in a shared studio on Dowling St, when John Cutler became my biggest client. ‘Wanaka’ is the third commission I did for John, and the only one with a specific brief. It now hangs in his Wanaka home.
John knew and liked my style of colour application (see the following two commissions) and wanted a piece in this same style that would represent Lake Wanaka. I like to work large scale and John had a large wall in mind he wanted to fill. This piece is two by two metres. The underpainting was a realistic painting of sky, mountains, lake and foreshore, which I then proceeded to demolish and obscure with paint — a lot of fun.
What’s Left After the Surge
Detail.
This is still my favourite piece to date that I have painted. Ever. Another two by two metre work, it doesn’t photograph particularly well, and is best seen in the flesh. Standing in front of it makes me feel as though I am underwater. If you live in Dunedin and would like to see it in person, it hangs in the reception of Cutlers Property Management and Real Estate.
There is a lot of paint on this canvas. I did two complete paintings on here before this iteration. Its weight imbues the canvas with a texture and heft that is visibly lush in person. I made the stretchers myself and if you look closely you can see the frame is slightly skewed. I never said I was a carpenter! I would very much like to paint another piece of this size in this style but the practicalities involved in painting, transporting, and storing or hanging such a large work means I really need to think about what it’s for and where it’s going.
This was the second commission I did for John with no creative brief except to go for broke. This style of painting is so expressive. It’s a physical workout and much more fun than a class at the gym. My sister described this piece as a marine-themed Jackson Pollock and I will love her forever for saying that.
The Outer Reaches
This was the very first commission I did for John, and again, with no creative brief except to show him what I was made of as a painter. I’d had a galaxy-tinged idea floating around in my brain for a few years and decided to have a go at it. This painting was decent-sized but fit in my car, which is important when you are transporting work yourself from where you paint it to where it is going to hang! Again, this piece was a lot of fun and hassle-free to make, and remains one of my favourite pieces to date. The colours are so vibrant they almost spill off the canvas.
Thank you all so much for reading — AMB
