“Idaho Dreaming”

Acrylic on Canvas

Commission Painted 2024

I love how personal the commission process can be. It’s an honor to bring someone else’s dream to life. Sure, it can be a challenge to understand someone else’s vision. But the collaboration process is something I enjoy.

The Brief Seemed Simple at First…

When my client approached me to work on a painting of the Grand Teton mountains, I was very excited because I’m a mountain girl. This was already a subject I could connect easily with.

She wanted a view of the mountains from the Idaho side, rather than the Wyoming side where Grand Teton National Park resides. She lived in Idaho with her husband at the beginning of their marriage, and she fondly remembered seeing these mountains from her back window each day.

I didn’t want to just recreate a photograph of the mountains for her—a photograph would sure be simpler and probably less expensive than commissioning a painting, but she came to me for this task. So my first challenge was to figure out how to make THIS painting of the Grand Tetons special for her.

Together, we explored her memories from that house, and one thing she noted was that she routinely enjoyed watching the cows in the field behind her house with the Tetons as backdrop. This led me to the idea of setting the scene with a cow pasture in the lower part of the canvas.

Collaborating on the Reference

As I searched for an appropriate reference of the Grand Tetons, I found a Zillow listing for some open land that had a great view of the mountains. I could imagine my client’s family buying this property, building a house, and putting cows out in the pasture on this property. It was perfect.

I secured client approval on this photograph as the skeleton of the reference, and asked what time of day she would like the scene to take place in. This is where it got tricky….

She said sunset. And she wanted a showy, brilliant sunset. 

The issue with this was that this view of the mountains is Eastward facing, so the sun would never set behind those mountains from this view. I told her I was happy to suspend disbelief and paint the sun setting behind the mountain anyway if she wished. Or I could paint a reverse sunset in some clouds above the mountains, and I provided a number of examples.

She decided she would like to keep it somewhat believable with a reverse sunset. But she wanted to fashion the sunset after one of the references I had shown her where the sunset had an effect that looked almost like the Aurora Borealis. This was unusual, and so much fun to bring into this subject. It made the painting feel so magical in the end! 

A One-of-a-Kind Piece of Art

My client was fine with me offering this piece to the general public as prints in the future. But when I work on a commissioned painting, it is my tendency to want to deliver a 100% custom product. I enjoy adding little details that will not be available to anyone else, increasing its value beyond just owning the original.

I scanned the painting digitally for future printing before pondering the personalization element. I recalled early on in our discussions that my client had REALLY wanted a painting of some pink Japanese blossoms, but did not think her husband would appreciate that in their living space. I had already painted in a little family of cows that mirrored her own family just for fun, so I added a necklace of blossoms around the neck of the cow that would represent my client.

I also recalled her mentioning her husband was really into fishing. This was a bit more difficult to work in. After a considerable amount of research, I stumbled across a superstition from the region: “When the cows are grazing, the fish are biting.” This was perfect because it tied in with the cows in the scene. I wrote this on one of the edges of the painting as a nod to him.

And with that, “Idaho Dreaming” was complete!

I’m hoping one day I can paint her those pink Japanese blossoms she originally wanted, too!