Behind The Commission: The Making Of "The Family Tree"

Halloran Parry
3 days ago
5 min read

Amid all the other busyness of last winter, some friends approached me about a commission. The gist of their request was “Behold the distressingly empty walls in this house. We love your work. Pitch us something.” and they gave me a budget. In this case, I know the family well, and I have a good idea of what gets them excited about life, so I was eager to take this on. Some artists will paint anything you want. My commissions are a little different. I’ll paint your story.

So let's talk about how you paint a story.

The Consult

The process starts with a consult -- in-person, on-site if possible -- where we talk about what matters. We talk about the space where the painting would go. We talk about the other art they have and the other art they like. We talk about our favorite memories and the things we’re excited about and what gets us out of bed in the mornings. But mostly I listen. Because what I’m really there for is to understand the world through my clients’ eyes.

In this case, my clients are warm, outgoing people who love each other, their children, and life in general, and that’s instantly evident when you walk in the door. The house buzzes with the cheerful, low-grade chaos of five people all engrossed in projects -- their own and each other’s. It’s a great atmosphere and one they work hard to cultivate, and I wanted to celebrate it. My job is to translate that feeling into an image without losing the narrative or sacrificing the craft.

I also knew that they really loved “The Sacred Flame”, so I took inspiration from that and drew up a sketch. At this point, my goal is “give us something concrete to discuss rather than a bunch of half-formed images in people’s heads”.

The Sketch

I wanted the tree to represent the family itself.

Sketches like this, as impressive as they can look, are the artist’s version of some notes scrawled on a dirty cocktail napkin a la Glass Onion. They’re a starting point. They’re meant to convey a rough idea of the major elements (tree, glowy orb, atmospheric sky, some compositional foreground). They’re easy to change. With sketches, I can quickly describe the story I want to tell and the elements I want to use to tell it.

I set it at dusk, in blues and purples, because I like the calm stillness of dusk. The serenity. The peace. Also, I needed a sky, and dusk was as good as anything else in the absence of more direct input.

The Pivot

I expected the client to want something different and I was right: they wanted the zippy energy of sunrise. Bright. Sparkly. Maybe even a bit adrenalized. (My clients and I are very different people.) This is the fire of creation, the spark of curiosity that drives us to explore our world. This is the energy that catapults people out of bed and into their lives with a cheerful spring in their step. (Your humble author, who has done whole paintings about being cozily half-awake with nowhere to be, is jealous.)

The Preparation

Trees are great painting subjects because they allow for a lot of creative freedom, and they tend to stay where you left them. Studying trees is a good excuse for an afternoon stroll through a nearby forest, at my convenience and when the weather is nice. Sunrises require a bit more planning.

Now I like a good sunrise as much as the next person, and I’d like them even more if they started at about 10 am. Alas, we are all at the mercy of the vast expanse of the cosmos and there’s not much I can do about it. Which is why I got up before dawn, grabbed my watercolor set, and climbed up on a friend’s roof. As an artist, it is my privilege to study the fires of creation, to bask in the same glow that has fueled millions of years of humanity before me, and translate it into paint.

I did not consider the challenges of painting outside, before dawn, i.e., in the dark.

Fortunately, my friend, who does a lot more plein air than I do, had seen this coming a mile away. She got up with me, made us both coffee, and held a flashlight over my paints while I tried to understand the color of the sun. (Thank you, Karol, for coming in clutch.)

The Painting

At 30x40 inches, this painting is large enough to demand some special treatment. A canvas of this size needs a sturdy set of stretcher bars to support it. The tension of the canvas can warp and bend weaker stretcher bars, and the canvas itself needs to be strong enough to survive the stretching process without tearing. For these reasons, and because I am picky on behalf of my clients, I stretch my canvases myself rather than trusting anything I can buy off the shelf. So I use aluminum-reinforced stretcher bars and a pre-primed linen canvas.

The aluminum-reinforced stretcher bars supporting the canvas

Once the canvas is properly stretched and tensioned, I spend a few days adding additional layers of gesso primer. This serves to strengthen the canvas and existing gesso layer, while also giving me control over the surface texture. For this commission, the detail work demanded a smooth surface, so I put down a layer of gesso, let it dry, and wet sanded it with some 300-grit blocks. I repeated that whole process a few times over the course of a week.

Sometimes I’ll do an underpainting in acrylic, but this sunrise demanded oil from the very beginning. So that’s what I did. Lay in the sunrise, let dry. Add water, let dry. Add tree, let dry. Go back and refine everything. Let dry. And so on.

This client asked me to include some “easter eggs”, i.e., hidden images within the painting, referencing family stories and fond memories. I thought this was a brilliant idea and couldn’t wait to try it. There are lots of techniques to hide secret visuals inside paintings and I used as many as I could. Just between us, one of my favorites is to build up a surface of varied brush strokes and colors and use it to hide iconography. You can see one example here: