Introduction – A Portrait Is Not Requested. It Is Entrusted.
To commission a fine art image is not about choosing a beautiful photograph. It is about telling a story you no longer know how to say out loud. It is not an aesthetic whim. It is a quiet act of vulnerability.
Over the years, people have come to me not with clear ideas, but with tremors. With a bruise. A longing. They didn’t always have the words. Sometimes it was a fragment of memory. A color. A sentence. A faded photo. And behind those fragments, something waiting to be said—without being explained.
Why Commission a Fine Art Image?
Because sometimes words are no longer enough. Because ordinary portraits fall short. Because there’s a silence inside us that asks to be made visible.
A commissioned image is not a portrait. It is a question. A visual hypothesis. A threshold between you and what you cannot yet articulate. Maybe you’ve lost someone. Or found something. Maybe you want your daughter to have an image in which she’ll recognize herself thirty years from now. Maybe you’ve lived through something that deserves more than silence.
We don’t commission a fine art image because we want something beautiful. We do it because there’s something we don’t understand yet—but need to face. Perhaps it’s something we’d rather not say aloud. Perhaps it’s the only way we can be seen for who we are when everything else fails to explain us.
How It Works – My Process
- The conversation – We meet. You talk, or not. I ask questions. You choose how much to share. There’s no brief. Only truth.
- The symbol – I begin sketching, writing, collecting. I don’t illustrate—I distill. I search for a symbol that can say more than anything I’ve heard.
- The creation – It comes in silence. Sometimes weeks pass. The image doesn’t arrive on demand—it reveals itself. When it does, I send it. Not before.
Commissioning a fine art image is not new. Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya—they all worked on commission. And yet, their works became personal declarations. The Night Watch was originally a civic piece—but Rembrandt turned it into a stage for darkness, motion, and tension. I see it the same way: the request is the frame. What happens inside is revelation.
What I Offer (and What I Don’t)
I don’t offer products. I offer images that are alive. That resemble you—but don’t flatter you. That contain you—but don’t explain you.
The image may feature you—or it may not. It might be your hands, your posture, your breath. Or it might be someone else entirely, embodying what you cannot show directly. But make no mistake: the story, the silence, the symbol… they all belong to you. This is not about likeness. It’s about resonance. What matters is not who stands in the light, but whose truth the light reveals.
You can commission a fine art image in a single edition. Or as part of a symbolic series. I can send a physical print. Or a digital version. But never the raw file, never the mechanism. Because this is not design. It is invocation.
What I receive, as an artist, is not just the creative challenge—it is the rare privilege of living another life. Like an actor who becomes Richard III, or Hamlet, or Lear, I too become a channel. I feel someone else’s grief. Someone else’s memory. Someone else’s unspoken truth.
When the image is born, I no longer know if it’s them, or me, or both. Sometimes the commissioned image is not about the one who requested it—but about what emerges when two people speak without language.
Who This Is For
- For collectors who don’t want objects, but symbols.
- For people who feel conventional portraits say nothing.
- For those who have lived through something and need it anchored.
- For those who see photography not as evidence, but as poetry.
Conclusion – If This Resounds in You
If you’ve read this far, perhaps there’s already an image inside you. Perhaps there’s a memory that’s never had a shape. Or maybe you’re simply curious what your silence looks like, in light.
I can create that image. But first, tell me who you are. Send me a message here
