Brask reveals largest painting commission
After about a year of development from early conversations through concept sketches, color studies, reference images, and finally the application of paint and “rain drips” down large canvases, this commission has been completed and revealed to the clients. This was Rachel Brask’s largest physical commission, most complicated in its imagery and connectivity, and complexity in its five-panels and spanning about nine feet.
THE PROGRESS & CONCEPT
The briefing was to create a sense of place celebrating the city and location in which the clients had been married, as a commission for their anniversary. The available space for the painting was about 9-10 feet wide, so we wanted to be ambitious with how we filled the space and the painting. Through conversations, we came up with the idea of five panels, two large panels with three narrower panels around each side. Through continued concepts, we wanted to combine two conceptual scenes into one, so the five panels were unified as one, but also so that there were two distinct artworks within each, so that should the need arise to put paintings in separate rooms or on different walls, a triptych and a diptych would be the result. Once Brask came up with the exact composition sketch that would express this best, she created an origami-inspired sketch, which folded and un-folded to show the different forms of the pencil sketch when all togther, or when broken into different works.
When developed as a color painted mock-up, each panel was sketched over a reprinted duplicate of the pencil sketch to maintain scale, and the colors were applied and painted and dripped to experiment and show how the specific colors chosen for the pieces would work when dripped over eachother as part of the rain technique. To display and examine the individual two-piece and three-piece panels, pieces of printer paper were held or taped over the parts to isolate specific panels for review, flow, and composition.
THE COMPLETED PROJECT REVEALED
Once the color painted proofs were approved by the clients, Rachel had to figure out the logistics of creating this as the large full-scale paintings. The first part of that was to jury-rig the easel with extra materials, clamps and tape to enable it to hold the two largest panels securely side-by-side so they could be painted in progression together, and then doing the same so the three panels could also be painted side-by-each. Taking into account client commission feedback, Brask worked on bringing the large paintings into their final, rainy forms.
During the in-between phases of working on the painting, Brask’s studio was open to the public most Sundays, and on one particular Sunday afternoon, not one, but two people recognized the buildings and landmarks of the painting from their home city in the midwest! To Rachel, this was validation enough that though she didn’t strive to make the building photo-realistic, that there was still enough even in their abstraction that they were still recognizable enough to those who know the landmarks.
Once they were dry enough to move, they were mounted on the wall in proper formation. And Brask installed a special reveal curtain across the entire wall, specifically for revealing this largest of commissions.
The clients arrived and knocked on the door. Deep breath.
We poured champagne to celebrate the reveal, the cork landed right into the paint of the palette of colors that was used to create the painting — how fitting! After our nerves and excitement settled, it was time to pull back the curtain!
For the artist, there’s always a nervous pause, as the clients take it all in… and then it’s in the smile, in the big intake of breath, of dropped jaws, of squeals of excitement, and relaxed expressions of awe, that the artist reads the client reactions. And then the big hugs of excited appreciation.
“We love it.”
Those three words make the entire project worth it from beginning to end.
