A Request for "the Same Painting as That One" | Recreation Record 01

The other day I received a message from a gallery I work with. Someone had come forward who "really wanted the same painting" as one I had previously delivered, an oil painting from 2025.

It was a grateful thing to hear. At the same time, it was the kind of request I could not accept as it stood.

The same painting is never born twice

A hand-painted picture is not an industrial product. Even with the same paints, the same brushes and the same composition, the same thing will never rise up on the canvas again.

The way the light came in on the day it was painted. How quickly the paint dried. What I was thinking and feeling during those hours. A finished painting holds, in its very layers, conditions that will never line up again. That is why a promise of "exactly the same thing" cannot be kept, however sincerely I work.

Harder still, I could not tell what it was about that painting that had drawn the client in. Was it the composition, the colour, or something like a presence deep within the picture? If I picked up the brush without knowing how far the "same" they wanted extended, the result could easily have been unhappy for us both.

Three agreements

So I proposed the following approach, and the client agreed.

First, I would make an underdrawing with the same composition as the original, and the client would review it at that stage.

Second, once it was approved, I would move on to colour. The client would understand that the colours would be painted in the same direction as the original.

Third, I would not accept a cancellation after completion on the grounds that it was "different from what I imagined".

The third may sound cold. But it is exactly why I always show the work once at the underdrawing stage. By placing a moment for the client's judgement partway through the process, we move forward only once we are both satisfied. As long as this order is kept, there is little chance of a mismatch at the end.

That someone would ask this much of me is, in itself, an honour as a maker. I want somehow to strike a balance between the charm the original held and the new painting now trying to be born.

Building the composition from a record photograph

And so the underdrawing began.

I took the record photograph of the original from my files and printed it at the same size as the actual canvas. With it beside me, I transferred the composition onto the canvas exactly as it was.

Up to this point, it is a procedure, so to speak.

Being an artist is an inconvenient thing

Yet this procedure does not go smoothly.

I ought simply to empty my mind and keep working, but a sense of play and an urge to rearrange start to stir. "Wouldn't it be better like this?" "If I changed this part, wouldn't it create that effect?" Thought and feeling begin to move on their own, beyond what should be a mechanical task.

At times like this I don't force my way forward. Instead I start making test pieces. Then that testing becomes interesting in its own right, I am tempted toward ideas for my own future works, and before I know it the work has shifted. I often find myself absorbed in that world for days on end.

Work for the client, and my own work. Moving both forward at once today too, each lifting the other, the painting gets a little better step by step.

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