The November 2014 raffle painting!

[GKreindler]

Thanks so much, everybody! I'm glad that you feel it's coming along.

Andrew, for the most part, I feel like when it comes to baseball paintings, I'm down for most ideas. I remember that when I first started, I only wanted to do large, sprawling panoramics and never smaller portraits. Eventually, I found myself liking the smaller portraits, but not so much those taken in a studio. My thoughts have changed on those over the past few years too, thankfully.

Really, the only thing I really don't enjoy doing (and more often than not say 'no' to) are those that I call 'montages'. I know the term's really meant for film, but I thought it kinda fit with a certain style of artwork, too. I'm really referring to a kind of painting that might have a large portrait on it with a few action images in the background, and doesn't necessarily depict an actual scene. It's not that I don't like those who make art like that, and I've definitely seen some incredible pieces done in that kind of picture-making style, it's just not really the kind of stuff that I want to paint. I'm a lot more interested in capturing a moment than.

I'm also not crazy about adding a client's family members (or the client him/herself) into a painting. I've done it a couple of times when it hasn't been super intrusive, and those paintings have ended up working well. However, there were a couple of commissions I did many years ago where the buyer was dead-set on seeing himself depicted in each one, and much more-so in a way that was pretty obvious. Neither of the two ended up being paintings that I was proud of because of that fact. I definitely understand what the appeal was, but in the end, again, it just wasn't the kind of stuff that I wanted to paint.

And of course, I don't say any of this stuff maliciously, as I'm always grateful that people even want to pay me to do something I love to do, but in the end, I think it's more satisfying to my soul to follow my own artistic inclinations, and to be honest, when I'm able to do so, I feel like the client always gets a better painting.

Graig