Bespoke canvas: commissioning Sarah Oliphant.

Every serious portrait has a surface behind it, and the best ones in the world have been painted by one woman. Sarah Oliphant’s hand-painted canvases sit behind the work of Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn, and most of the photographers I learned from. I wanted that provenance in my own studio, so I commissioned one.

An Oliphant backdrop is painted to order, by hand, one at a time. Against a solid background a subject floats; against one of these there is depth, texture, and a tone that shifts with the light. Move the subject closer to the canvas and it reads darker and richer; pull them away and it opens up. One canvas gives you a range, and its texture becomes a signature that runs through the work.

My first was a warm gray. It is one of the most beautiful objects in the studio and it has not left the wall since.

The second commission was golds and greens, mixed so I could pull the image warm or cool depending on the sitting. I happened to be in New York the week it was finished, and Sarah invited me to the studio to see it. What I found was closer to a painter’s atelier than a supply house: racks of finished canvases, shelves of pigment, and a workflow with far more in it than the finished surface lets on. She walked me through it, and I took the lesson as a student.

We broke the new canvas in by lying down on it. It now hangs in Dallas, and it sits behind a good deal of the work in the portfolio. When you see a wash of green and gold behind a portrait here, that is where it came from.