A Tale of Two Dog Portraits
April 25, 2022
My brother did the unthinkable. He hired another artist to do a portrait of his dog Stella.
Stella is a nine-year-old chihuahua mix, so diminutive in size that many people mistake her for a puppy, despite the gray in her whiskers. And my brother paid another artist to do a portrait of her in front of his alma mater of Howard Univerity.
In my brother’s defense, he was at an outdoor fair with Stella and, being gregarious by nature, agreed to a commission of Stella when a local artist approached him. Yet, despite this gesture of generosity and goodwill, I couldn’t help but feel slighted. It felt like somebody had slapped me into another dimension because so much of the reality of what was happening didn’t make sense. Imagine if you cook some pretty good fried chicken and everyone in your entire family knows how good your chicken is, yet every time your brother comes to visit you, he has a three-piece from KFC. You start to feel that maybe he doesn’t feel the same way about your chicken that everyone else does. Horrible metaphor because I’m a vegetarian, but you catch my drift.
Hey, Nick, you paid somebody else to do a portrait for you when you know I’m a professional portrait artist? And, am I’m your brother.
Situations like this are how Grinches are made. A heart can only take so much disappointment.
I tried to rationalize to myself that as long as he gets a nice memento of Stella, what does it matter? And just as my ego was finally able to squeeze some solace out of the situation, the final portrait came in:
This is not a joke. Sometimes blood is thicker than water.
Now, I wouldn’t disparage any artist. There is value in everything, and actually, there are aspects of this that I like. But do I think it’s fair to charge as much as they did for this piece? No. I wouldn’t say this rises to the level of professional portraiture, but perhaps it’s a step on the journey there. And as I would define it, this is a caricature, not a portrait, so maybe it would have been more appropriate to charge caricature prices.
But ultimately, I felt there was only one thing left for me to do: redo the portrait out of spite and show him a field of dunces has no seeds.
