CREATE YOUR TEMPLE

Commissioned large-scale custom paintings of places + spaces that are meaningful + special to commissioning clients

Temple of the Sun was the first Create Your Temple piece to be created. It is a combined salutation and celebration of two very special places with deep and sacred meaning to me: Sydney, Australia and Chicago, United States, made up of nine 12" x 12" standalone abstract square paintings that when brought together form the complete scene of the Sydney hill neighborhoods I spent time in for three months in 2016 and the Chicago sky I witnessed over the course of summer 2021 while open-water swimming daily in Lake Michigan.

The gallery of photographs below shares a bit of how the creative process works, starting with the finished 9-panel Temple of the Sun, followed by each panel that makes it up, in the order in which I painted them, and finishing with the completed piece installed on the wall of my Chicago gallery/studio. Click on each image to see it at full scale. Hovering over each image provides a zooming lightbox view to see details.

THE 'CREATE YOUR TEMPLE' PROCESS

The custom commissioned Create Your Temple pieces are created through the client sharing a photograph and/or describing a special place (such as a nature setting or city) or space (such as a home, studio, room, boat, museum gallery) in detail, especially what makes it so special to them. We then decide together what shape and scale of work is being commissioned based on client preferences and the scale of the space where it will hang. Temple of the Sun is composed of nine 12-inch by 12-inch square paintings forming a final large 3-foot by 3-foot square complete painting. Client-commissioned pieces can be any shape and any orientation.

Once decided on shape, size, orientation and number of panel paintings composing the final complete scene of the special place or space with the client, with a copy of the client's photograph or one I find online, I use a sizing and gridding process to blow up and reveal the varied pixels of color in the photo. I paint each painting panel that forms the final complete scene when brought together without looking at any of the others that make up the original photograph and without looking at the original photograph itself. The interest and magic, then, is in the reveal of bringing each grid painting (which is often abstract when seen alone) together to form the full-scale image from the original photograph and seeing how closely they line up without having been referred to in sequence to guide and "match up" with the previous grid image/painting.