WHY ARTISTS ARE GOING EXTINCT

Never Paint a Kid

It’s getting hord out here for a pimp of arts and letters such as myself. 

Since I can no longer support myself as a writer (unless more of you become PAID SUBSCRIBERS ahem), I’ve been picking up side-hustles like manuscript editing and oil painting portrait commissions.  The paintings are selling in a slow trickle — it’s amazing they sell at all, considering I have zero infrastructure, exposure or support, save my relatively limited reach on social media. 

So, I got a commission from a lawyer who owns another painting of mine - a portrait of Voltaire wearing a pair of strange goggles.  He wanted me to paint his 3-year-old daughter with a doll she carries around all the time, that he thought looked just like her.   Since he was a repeat customer, I enthusiastically agreed to paint the kid and her doll without any kind of contract or deposit.  

When I received the photos of the kid I was less than psyched.  To put it delicately, the lighting was so harsh and bad that the baby looked hungover in all the shots.  Her jutting forehead tended to block all the light to her eyes, so her eyes had dark, insomniac-looking circles under them.  Her complexion was quite pale. Her mouth, however thin her upper lip, was crooked in a cute way.  

But I had deep respect for the fact that this was someone’s baby, so I was determined to smash all the photos of her together in my mind and try to merge them into something with better lighting, thus glamorizing the infant slightly. 

This proved to be my undoing. 

Tattoo artists have a terrible time with baby portraits because kid’s faces have such soft features.   I knew this, but heedlessly painted the fucking thing anyway.  Hubris. 

I opted for a sort of Victorian-style portrait of the kid and her doll.  I spent a month attacking and retreating from it.  My first attempt at the kid’s face wasn’t right, but on my second attempt, I thought I really nailed it.  I thought the expression on her face was cute and a little bit creepy, but in a good way.

 I showed it to another painter friend who volunteered that I’d captured the kid’s likeness. So, I put on some finishing touches and proudly sent a photo of the painting to my customer. 

He didn’t respond.  At all. 

A couple of days later I emailed him again.  

“If you hate it, please let me know.  I can make changes,” I wrote to him. 

He wrote back a few hours later. 

 He did, in fact, hate it —  so much so that he seemed to be absolutely furious at me, like I’d painted it to make him hate it on purpose.   

I was all apologies and offered to make changes —   I explained that his photographs were really bad, which made it difficult. 

He wrote me a long letter about how I shouldn’t have agreed to paint from bad photos.   I told him, truthfully, I didn’t know I couldn’t do it until I tried. 

He asked how I wanted to resolve this issue, and I told him that thought 50% of the commission price was fair. 

That’s when Lawyer Boy showed his true colors.  He unzipped his human suit and his inner reptile emerged.  He started lawyering at me hard.  That price, he said, was absurd. 

The painting repulsed him utterly — he said he found it “disturbing.” He mentioned something about the girl’s “dead eyes” and wrong hair, then he went on to insult other aspects of it, accusing me of trying to scam him out of money. 

This is what Cluster-Bs, cornered rats and capitalists do: devalue your labor, and accuse you of ill intent. 

“I actually softened the dark circles under your kid’s eyes,” I wrote in my own defense, which was absolutely true.  I thought some of the circles should remain for verisimilitude — it was simply the shape of her eyes, which were a tad on the googly side (not that I told him this, because that would be mean.) 

He retorted that his child didn’t have dark circles under her eyes, and I knew that I was fighting a losing battle, because he was fucking high. 

“In every single photo, she does,” I retorted, because it was true, but I realized that moment that I had stepped into quicksand. It wasn’t like I hauled off and told the guy his toddler looked like an alcoholic potato, but you’d think I had, given his next email, which was an absolute fit of pique. 

We left it in limbo for a  day, in which I thought and thought and thought about how to save the painting, and decided to opt for a Hail Mary — I painted a set of day-glo goggles on the kid, which I felt would satisfy me deeply, cover up the offending under-eye problem, and make it a set with the Voltaire painting.  

The guy went fucking berzerk.  He accused me of painting the goggles to lampoon his child.  He started gaslighting me by listing all specifications for the painting he’d allegedly made, and then accusing me of gaslighting him.  

I should have known what a sniveling half-person, soulless yuppie and unmanned predator drone he was just by the fact that he is a lawyer, and how few photos he had of his kid, and how utterly shitty they all were. 

I mean, my nieces and nephews are photographed pretty much every damned day — then again, they are half-Nicaraguan and therefore ungodly beautiful — bone structure like Ferraris. My sister and I trade kid pictures on our phones like baseball cards all day long.  We can’t stand that their youth is escaping on a daily basis.  We want to preserve every minute of their exquisite little faces. 

He wanted to pay me $200.  I asked him for $250.   When he finally Venmo’d me, after more sturm und drang and wild accusations, it was for $200, which I thought was super shitty.  I’d have tacked on the $50 just to make me not hate him. 

If he had such an issue with his kid’s features, (I was burning to say but didn’t, because I’m better than that) he should take it up with whomever provided her genetic material. 

“This is a problem that painters have had through the ages,” said my mother.  “Nobody wants to see their kid through anyone else’s eyes,” said my Dad, the former art professor.   Nobody is capable of seeing someone else’s child through the Vaseline delusions of parenthood. 

But I learned 3 things:  One:  Never under any circumstances paint someone’s baby, 2: Always take a deposit in front, and 3: The world needs feckless artistes like me, or everybody will be like that fuckin’ guy.  Eyeless, like a worm.  Always competing in a zero sum game.  Incapable of appreciating the genius of day-glo baby goggles. 

The best revenge, I figure, is just not being that way. 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Name Redacted,” oil on canvas, 2024. ON SALE NOW.