Lon,
Ah, REJECTION! Below is a little piece I did about ten years ago as a commission. It's a pendant in marquetry a la Boule. The light part of the Least Tern is in silver, cut as a single piece from a silver dollar using a jeweler's saw. The rest of the pendant is in Corian and another polymer that I cooked up myself. It was done as a birthday gift for the significant other of the man commissioning it. When she saw it she flipped out; turns out she had a phobia about birds! (the Hitchcock movie, maybe?) Naturally, the man who commissioned it claimed that he knew about the phobia all along, and that he'd really told me he wanted a sailboat! Well, there wasn't much money involved, so I did another pendant with a sailboat and got paid and that was the end of the matter. They say the customer is always right, but I always thought this piece was far superior to what they wound up with, phobias notwithstanding.
With a portrait, on the other hand, there is always the possibility of seeking revenge. Sometimes we fail to realize that, as artists, we have a certain amount of power, limited though it may be. A few years ago I read an article (in the Wall Street Journal, I think) about portrait artists. One of the anecdotes was about an Italian painter who had labored for some 200 hours (a year's work) on a group family portrait. The piece was rejected on presentation, leaving her short the equivalent of $ 26,000 in final payment. Having little recourse for collection, but still owning the painting, she was considering spending a few more hours repainting the grandmother in the nude and exhibiting the painting for sale in her next show at her commercial gallery. That might be professional suicide, but, oh, how satisfying!!
