Quent Cordair Fine Art

It turns out I wasn’t on the right track, but after an actual phone conversation with the client I had a much better idea of what direction to work in. The Architect would be looking at the house from a vantage point across from the cliff, the house would be newly completed as opposed to under construction, and the scene would be set at sunrise to suggest a beginning and provide for more dramatic lighting. I worked out a new composition (below). I set the house in the distance, trying to keep the sense of height above the ocean, and put the Architect in the foreground, looking over at the house and sort-of gesturing to it. The pose was incredibly rudimentary, as was the design of the house, but I needed to know if I was getting any closer to what the client wanted.

The response was good. The client liked the general idea, but wanted the house to be more prominent. While I was working on the sketch below, I was beginning to recognize that I would have to eventually come up with a design for the house. This version is drastically different from the one we finally settled on, but there are a few elements that survived through to the finished painting.

Closer. The pose was now more of an issue. The gesture was, admittedly, a little vague. After some discussion, we hit upon the idea of the Architect holding the plans for the house to indicate both his having designed it, and its recent completion. I did a very similar thing in A New Height.

At this point, most of the exact details of the composition were still very rough, the house had not been designed, I had no real reference material for the cliffs, and I was working without a model for the figure. Although I can often move forward with an idea this way, a clearer picture of the final painting forming in my mind while some very general spatial issues are worked out in the thumbnail sketches, all the client had to go on at this point was the drawing above. Now that the overall layout of the painting was beginning to concretize, his major concerns turned to some of the specific details. The house still needed to be bigger, the Architect needed to be more physically fit, more muscular and represent a more mature age closer to 40 than 18, and the house needed work. I was sent a few images of houses designed by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, and a favorite architect of the client’s. After at least a dozen iterations, I sent off the sketch below.

Many of you may be aware that I spent a large portion of last year working on a commission painting of an architect. For various reasons neither the Cordair Gallery nor myself have not posted any but the most cursory, compositional images of this painting…until now. In this installment of the Artist’s Studio, I will be discussing the creation of this piece from its first conception in late spring of 2007 to its completion in October.

First, a little disclaimer. Last November, I had what could be politely described as a minor disagreement with my computer. Had I written this paragraph then, I’m sure the FCC would have had several full-time censors pouring over it with red ink before it met even the internet’s standards for civilized language. Even now, the details of the altercation are not pleasant for me to reflect on, and I have no reason to inflict then on any of you. Why then, you may wonder, would I bring it up at all? Only because in the midst of the chaos I lost a large number of image files, including about half my record of this painting’s progress. So, if you find yourself in the least bit irritated with any minor gaps in my commentary, or with the sometimes incredibly poor quality of some of the included images, feel free to fire off a polite letter to the good people at Microsoft and HP who helped to make it all possible.

And yes, I should have backed up my computer.

Back to the painting. I think much of the interesting work on this piece happened long before I put any paint on the canvas. Since the painting was a commission, and the client had a very specific but difficult to articulate idea of what he wanted, the composition underwent a considerable evolution during the planning stages.

When the gallery first approached me about the idea, I was told they had a client who wanted to commission a painting of an architect and his first great house which would be on a cliff, looking over the ocean. It would represent the first breakthrough creation of a brilliant career. To me this immediately suggested the more general theme of creation. I was also given some rough measurements of the space where the painting would eventually hang. I wanted to give a sense of the height of the cliffs, show enough detail of the house to hint at its overall style, and show something of the intimate relationship between the Architect and his creation. I came up with the following four compositional sketches, and sent them to the client to see if I was on the right track. You will see the obvious influence of Frank Lloyd Wright in the design of the house. Less obvious is the fact that I was thinking of the house as being under construction.