The art of commissioning art

I was recently asked to help find some art to hang in the hallway of my clients' house. Little did I know that I was going to find the most perfect work.

My clients were looking for something painted in the Old Masters style, but with a contemporary twist. I interpreted this to be something like this work by Jacob von Es (a Flemish painter from the Baroque period), but I needed to fulfill the "modern twist" part of the brief. Trinidad Ball's realist still life work is painted using oils on canvas. The picture composition was much less cluttered than what my client had asked for, but the painting style was right, and the minimal look satisfied the "modern" part of my client's brief. When I got back to my studio, I quickly emailed my client.

My client's house is called Peach House, and although Trinidad hadn't done any previous studies on peaches, I felt sure we might be able to get her to do a commission for us. I arranged a meeting at Trinidad's studio with my clients. It was really fascinating to see how Trinidad composes her pieces, starting first with rough colour mockup (or "oil sketches", as Trinidad calls them), and then we saw how she builds up the layers of paint.

We discussed the shapes of peaches, their texture, how they look different through the seasons, the colour of the fruit, and how we could tie all this in with the colour scheme for the hallway. We concluded that the composition should be of four different peaches, depicting the fruit through the seasons. Oak wood was introduced to the pictures to help tie the paintings to the hallway scheme, and we chose the background colour of the pictures is a tonal shade of the wall paint. As with the Old Masters style of painting, Trinidad's work relies heavily on shadows and we made sure that the shadows were consistent with the natural flow of light through the front door.

My client liked the idea of framing the pictures together as one larger picture, which encourages the viewer to read the picture as one piece, as opposed to four smaller pieces. My client really loves the art, not least because my clients hail originally from Trinidad, and that's the artist's name. I couldn't make it up if I tried