Planet Goodaboom, Monday 19th February 2007
I told you already about my most recent portraits on commission and the resulting hunting trip through the galaxies after an eye spinning around his orbit...
I sent the photos of the portraits via mail to my clients some days ago and these two Dutch kiddies have been approved by their proud grand-parents now.
I received a very nice mail from them, expressing their happiness and gratitude about my work.
When you get such compliments, really, however much you have suffered before and doubted your aptitude as a portrait painter –and this was the case this time by one of the boys, believe me! Kevin saved the poor innocent boy more than once from the garbage bin!- you forget all that pain and just feel deeply fullfilled to have given your clients such happiness.
I never experienced in my life, in other domains where I worked such a feeling to have been „useful“, to have something important to give to humanity.
I don´t know if I told you before, but my first profession is mathematician. I initially worked teaching younger students mathematics in the University and later on, in the industry as a consultant resolving inner structural and financial problems of companies in trouble. Even if I know that what I did was very useful, for the students as well as for the companies, I never felt so inwardly accomplished as when I create a portrait which make my clients happy.
This is especially true of portraits. I already made a lot of paintings on commission –landscapes, sport scenes, flowers, animals, etc...- but the satisfaction is never so deep as with portraits.
Why is it so?
Honestly: I have no idea!
But it is almost certainly to do with the intensity with which I invest myself within the portraits when I paint them. It evolves into total identification with the subject. And of course it is quite hard to identify oneself with a dog or a flower....
Anyway: in life the satisfaction we get from some work done is always proportional to the inner effort we had to do to achieve it, isn´t it so? And everybody knows it: portraiting is quite a hard task!
So lets hope I´ll always have occasion to make this special gift to humanity... well, I know, it is a special kind of gift as it is not quite free of charges, but I am sure you will forgive me!
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