You know what a perfect commission is, for an artist? It’s a client who has a tight but loose idea of what he wants, no strict deadline, implicit trust in the artist and the cajones to plunk half the fee up front to boot. That’s a great client, and recently I finished a commission for a guy like that, to make for him a bit of original Bed-Stuy art.
Bed-Stuy Art: the Genesis
He’d recently bought and moved into an old brownstone in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and wanted some custom Bed-Stuy art for the walls. Something BIG. Something playful but “clear-eyed,” with a personal point of view and the touch of the artistic hand visible throughout. Not too slick, not too silly, but still fun, juicy and eye-catching. Beyond that, only one other phrase of instruction. With a visionary’s wave of his outstretched hand he intoned dramatically: “Bed-Stuy! It’s action-packed!”
That, essentially, is what I had to work with. That and the dimensions: four feet by five. 48 flippin’ inches by 60. That’s a biggie. But this is what I mean by “tight but loose.” Some specific wants, but few specific instructions on how to achieve the end. Kind of like Jimmy Page envisioned Zepplin’s music.
So I got to work. Man, it was fun. First came a free-flow of ideas which I jotted down about Bed-Stuy, a formerly very black neighborhood undergoing massive, sweeping transformation the past several years. Call it gentrification, sprucing up, a renaissance, a damn shame, hyper-rejuvenation or whatever, but the nabe, it is a-changing. So that sort of became the main theme I worked with. Change. Old meets new meets even newer.
Then the sketching began. I started with a street-level view, but quickly realized that it didn’t encapsulate the magnitude of the neighborhood and its changes. I pulled my perspective up and back, to get a huge swath of streets and buildings, then quickly realized it was pretty much what the great Saul Steinberg did with his “New Yorker’s View of the World” classic from 1976. My piece echoes Steinberg, drawn in my own undergroundish, early-Mad magazine style. Tight but loose.
So the sketching went on a while, then the inking, then I had the piece blown up and printed onto canvas, stretched and mounted on a large, custom-built frame, brought it to my studio and painted the hell out of it with a loose, acrylic wash.
That was that, and this is it:
The fun is in the details. I’m happy to report that the client was pleased. So was I.
If you’d like to commission a piece of your own, please contact me at johntebeau (at) gmail.com.
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