Commission Me

 

SUBJECT & STYLE 
Whether it's a portrait, still life, figurative, floral, or abstract, I am up for the challenge of creating a painting for you. Thank you for your interest. I'm assuming that your interest reflects your attraction to the style of my work, which is loose and expressive. Sometimes I call my style representational abstract. I also call it whimsical angst. My style is NOT hyper realism so if you want a painting to NOT be an exact replica of a reference image, I am your artist. 

Please email me two images of the subject you have in mind and allow me to pick one from the two. Please DO NOT email me any image that you do not want me to select. Crisp and clear images with high contrast (lots of light and shadow) are the best.

*PRICING* for ART 
Along with the images of your desired subject, a non-refundable $100 deposit via Zelle or Venmo is usually how we can start the process. The balance of the the work can be rendered after delivery of the work priced as follows for smaller (up to 8x10 inches); middler (up to 11x14 inches); larger (up to 30x30 inches):

• Smaller acrylic: $200 

• Middler acrylic: $300

• Larger acrylic: $500

NOTES: I've done commissions for much larger canvases and if that is your desire, we can discuss details.

SHIPPING & MATERIALS
Shipping costs will be calculated and I will let you know how much that will be and ask you to add it to your final payment before I ship it. Better yet, if you have a FedEx account, I can ship it using your account number. Material costs will also be calculated in for works larger than 18x24 inches. If you are able to pick up the work from my Santa Ana studio, that would also work.

*ASTERISK*
If after you see the final painting you do not love it, you do not have to buy it. I will accept the deposit as payment for the work and keep/sell/repurpose the art. With very few exceptions, I will not repaint portions of a final painting.

My Travel Teaching Program

 

Thank you for your interest in having me travel to your space to teach art. I am grateful to be able to enter my new life chapter where I can once again say YES to travel teaching. I consider every invitation an honor and am committed to organizing and executing each workshop experience with artistic depth, elegance, meaning, fun, and approachability for learners of all levels. Here are some questions and answers to questions related to my travel teaching program:

Q: What sort of art workshops do you teach?
A: The following seven categories of art are generally what I teach. 

• Expressive Acrylic Painting: 1 full day up to 3 full days
• Expressive Watercolors & Stitches: 1 half day up to 2 full days 
• Expressive Blind Contour on paper and wood: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Wire Sculpture: 1 half day up to 1 full day 
• Cardboard Art: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Free Motion Art Stitching: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Art Journaling & Creative Lettering: 1 half day up to 1 full day 
• 1 half day = 3 hours
• 1 full day = 6 hours + 1 hour for lunch

Within the above categories, I can tailor the workshop with an emphasis that you're interested in. For example, within painting, we could focus on portraits, or figurative art, or florals, portals, or still life,  etcetera. 

Q: Do you provide tools and materials?
A: No. With each workshop, I provide a list of materials that each student needs to bring to the workshop. Also, the hosting studio would need to equip the area with tables, chairs, and any other items that would help each student feel comfortable to create in.

Q: Can you teach art in a corporate team-building setting?
A: Yes. I have experience leading corporate team-building experiences through art. As long as your office can provide the space, and each participant is provided with materials for the workshop, it can happen. 

Q: What is your rate?
A: The hosting studio will be in charge of collecting payment (with any overhead markup for the studio) and then paying me per the following rates: 

• 1 half day: $50 per student per half day
• 1 full day: $120 per student per day
• 2 full days: $240 per student for 2 total days
• 3 full days: $360 per student for 3 total days

*Some classes will have a kit fee ranging from $10 to $40 per student which I can either collect from students on the day of the workshop or the studio can collect on my behalf and then transfer to me.

Q: Do you need support for travel expenses?
A: If your space is far enough where I need lodging, I would love it if you could host me in your home/facility so that neither you nor I have to budget for lodging. If there is not a host facility, I would appreciate support to offset lodging costs that I incur. If I travel to your space by air, I would need support to offset air travel and potentially ground transportation. 

Q: Do you have an enrollment minimum/maximum?
A: My minimum enrollment is six to eight students. I have no maximum.

Q: Can you help promote the workshop?
A: Yes! I think promotion is a team effort and I feel very comfortable using all of my social media platforms to creatively and effectively promote my workshops.

Q: I've taken your workshop. I want to paint with you in a private or semi-private setting. Is that possible?
A: Yes! If you are able to travel to my home studio in Santa Ana with a brown bag lunch, a private full day would be $200 per day. If you are able to bring another person or two for a semi-private, it would be $180 per day per person.

Q: I have a small group of people who want to go to your studio to paint. Is that possible?
A: At this time, my home studio can accommodate 4-5 people for a full-on painting workshop so yes. Each person would need to bring a brown bag lunch and for out-of-towners, you'd need to research and secure your lodging and ground transportation.

Q: I have a small group of people who I want to host either in my home or our community center for a celebration and I want them to paint. Would you be available for that?
A: Yep. This would be possible. Send me an email at jenny@crescendoh.com to iron out the details.

Q; Anything else?
A: I'm super open to communicating with you to discuss the specifics of what you're looking for and using our best ideas to make the workshop happen. Please feel free to email me at jenny@crescendoh.com to start the conversation. Please take a look at my expressive style of art at @jennydoh on Instagram and also at jennydoh.com. Loose and expressive is what I'm drawn to and what I teach. I am grateful for your interest.

Thank you.

Photos below are of some workshops I've taught in past years in
wonderful studios across the nation with extraordinary hosts and inspiring learners.

(San Diego, 2023)

(Seattle, 2017)

(Houston, 2017)

(Corporate team-building, Santa Ana, 2018)

(Bakersfield, 2016)

(Portland)

(Shreveport, 2019)

(Denver, 2018)

(Portland)

Bridge Across a Chasm

 

Who throws a party on a Tuesday? 

I guess I do, if you call what happened last Tuesday a party. It wasn't exactly that. It was more like a melding of love and life and music and art for three hours in my home with people from different pockets of my world. Some very familiar pockets and some newer ones that I'm getting to know. On a Tuesday. In the middle of summer. It felt like an art salon of vibrant vulnerability and joy.

My dear friend Dori had offered to come down from northern California and cook an Italian dinner for me and my friends as a gift. She had been unable to attend Gerardo's celebration and now, almost four months after that moment, I said hell yes to this unique bridge that she extended. 

I've been known to burrow myself into the hole of solitude like nobody else. I can hold my breath and stay there longer than anybody else. And within the last four months, I've realized that I don't want to do that. I could justify doing that by pointing out how flawed everything and everybody (especially me) is. And what would that give me? No friends. No love. No party. No art. No music. Nothing delicious. Not one thing.

We humans. We burn through life. 

I think I want to burn through it as artistically, creatively, and meaningfully as possible. Flaws and all. 

In giving, you throw a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Remembering Ignacio

 

On this Memorial Day 2023, it is my honor to wear one of the medals awarded Ignacio P. Mouet, my late father-in-law. Below are words that my late husband Gerardo Mouet penned on November 22, 2022 on his Facebook page, approximately four months before he passed:

The bravest man I have ever known was my Dad. They called him Ruso. As a Mexican national he volunteered in 1944 to become U.S. soldier. He gambled he would survive WW II and that the U.S. side would win. If all that happened he would become a U.S. Citizen and would be able to better take care of his beautiful Tijuana girlfriend that will eventually he would marry and ended becoming my mom [Migdalia Salinas].

My Dad has inspired me to start writing my first novel. If you look closely, you will see a business size Christmas card by his commanding general, General G. S. Patton Jr.

—Gerardo Mouet (November 22, 2022) 

Thank you to Ignacio and all others who served. We honor you.

Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney

 

LOOKING
Early in the book Beautiful World Where are You by Sally Rooney, the character Felix recounts when he lost his mom and remembers thinking "what's the fucking point of life, you know? It's not like there's anything at the end of it (57)." He says this to Alice, a successful novelist who, even with all of her success, also has a mound of grievances about the pointlessness of life. Alice and Felix have started something. Nothing to be certain about but perhaps something beautiful. At this start of this something, they look at each other ... "It was too dark for either of them to glean much information from the other's face, and yet they kept looking, and did not break off, as if the act of looking was more important than what they could see (58)."

AG and IG
Recently, I learned that along with theism, atheism ,and agnosticism, there is also a belief called ignosticism. There's something about the uncertainty embedded in agnosticism that I've always regarded as beautiful because it's within uncertainty that honest questions can be asked—where wonder and curiosity and imagination can be unleashed. Another reason I view agnosticism as beautiful is because the agnostic cares. We may not be certain, but we care about whether there is something after this.

Ignostics on the other hand don't know and don't care. Maybe that's why I've never been one.

OPPOSITE OF BEAUTIFUL
Eileen is an aspiring writer and Alice's best friend who is also searching for the answer to the question of whether there is beauty in the world. She points to the hopelessness of the chance that beauty is nowhere, especially given the futility of resisting the current soul-sucking attention economy that is fueled by what I think is opposite of beautiful, which is garish certainty:

"I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group ... there is an oppressor group ... But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good an the oppressors are personally evil ... and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning (81)." 

SPOILER ALERT: NO SORDID SEX
For a large portion of the book, the tension that was building made me think that Alice and Felix, along with Eileen and her love Simon would all end up in a sordid foursome.

But that is not the way the story ends up. (Not that I would think less of them if it had.) It actually ends up with Alice making the case that her very simple life choices of the moment ... to put the writing life on hold, to love Simon and to have a baby with him reflect that humanity at its core isn't about extraordinarily sordid heights but rather, ordinary levels of  care. To care, even in uncertainty.

PODOCANA: Sober Curious with Jason Gots

 

It's like a book club but instead of discussing books, PODOCANA discusses specific podcast episodes. Last night, PODOCANA discussed the Sober Curious podcast episode featuring an interview with my amazing author friend, Jason Gots. It was thrilling to welcome a whole new cohort into PODOCANA—namely many of my former UCI students who I am so proud of and am grateful to have in my life.

Crisynda, one of the regular PODOCANA members couldn't be there because she was feeling under the weather but sent me some thoughts after she listened to the podcast which I read to the group to start off the discussion:

I think one of the points of the podcast episode that struck me hard was in fact how Jason made a conscious choice to be with Mary without judgement ... not as a parental figure or a sponsor figure but simply as an accepting figure who could meet Mary where she was—not to enable her per se, but to be with her without prejudice. It got me thinking about how I think I could do that more easily with certain relationships (like a friend or a sibling) and less easily with other relationships (like a child).

Other things we pondered as a group include:

• whether time to dedicate to one's mindfulness is tied to the amount of privilege we have
• the importance of recognizing the differing cup sizes we each hold in terms of our ability to receive what another person gives to us
• whether resisting easy answers is inherently valuable or whether sometimes it's ok not to resist them just because they seem easy
• that it's ok to not do anything about changing a feeling that we are experiencing even though popular narratives might convince us that certain feelings require change
• how everybody lives with bias (even those of us who think we don't)
• the importance of recognizing context

We also shared what each of us love to drink (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic). The responses were fun to hear! My favorite non-alcoholic drink is topo chico with coconut juice. My favorite alcoholic drink as of late is an Irish whiskey (Jameson). Neat.

Here is my full book review of Humanity is Trying by Jason Gots.

If you live near Santa Ana and would like to join in on a future PODOCANA and love discussions that feel like you're in an idea lab instead of an echo chamber, send me a note. 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 

I FINALLY finished reading Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner today. I wasn't in H Mart when I finished reading it. I was in my bed. My new bed. And in my new bed, I cried as I read the final gut-wrenching sentence (in her memoir about the complex bond between she and her dying mom) that broke me into many pieces. A final sentence that only a person who has experienced profound loss can write. The kind of sentence that requires a wisdom that can only be acquired through the throughness of it all. Until you go through the complexity and the dread and the beauty of it all. Until you sing it, weep it, scream it, convulse it, choke on it, drown in it, and come back up for air gasping on it. 

I never knew I'd be sleeping in a new bed. Smaller than the bed Gerardo and I had together. Bigger than the hospital bed that had replaced our large bed for the last couple of years—the one he used before he passed. I never knew I'd ever own anything called Queen-sized. I never knew. Until now, as I know.

Crying in H Mart is the first book Gerardo and I selected for our book club for two: Jenny & Gerardo's Book Club. The club was organized in such a way that I would read it aloud to him on days when he needed a distraction from his pain ... pain so severe that he couldn't read anything on his own. Pain that only allowed reading to be done aloud to him, in small spurts.

There were eerie similarities between the suffering that Gerardo and Michelle's mom went through. There were eerie similarities about the love and tension and struggles of being a dying person and being a person with a dying person: "My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her (p. 169)." Sometimes I had to put the book down because Gerardo and I had to pause and weep together as we could see what was coming down the pike as we saw what was happening to Michelle's mother. 

Our book club never moved onto a second book mainly because our club wasn't able to complete Crying in H Mart as Gerardo passed before we could finish it together. 

An important and courageous facet of this book is Michelle's ability to confront some of the unfairness she bestowed onto her mom—a narrative so common that it has become an embarrassing cliche—of a child punching the lowest hanging fruit, citing imperfections of a parent as the forever reasons of the adult child's imperfections of the present. The confrontation is admirable because she is able to articulate a kind of regret that can only be summoned when faced with losing a flawed and loving parent while riding a high horse for much too long: "Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to (p. 176)."

The way a person goes through grief is unique to each person. And the way a person cares for oneself and becomes self-aware is unique to each person. Michelle's epiphany about therapy and self-care is something I love: "Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn't psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway. I was paying a hundred-dollar copay per session, and I began to think it would be much more fulfilling to just take myself out for a fifty-dollar lunch twice a week. I canceled the rest of my sessions and committed myself to exploring alternative forms of self-care (p. 212)."

My self-care these days includes saying yes to invitations by my trusted friends who are circling their wagons around me with their loving, watchful eyes. I have committed to never turning down an invitation from this circle so that I can remain engaged with good people and have good spaces to process what I'm going through without receiving an invoice from such interactions. My self-care also includes letting it all flow through me—where I let myself cry in H Mart if I feel like it, or Albertsons if I feel like it, or Target if I feel like it, or my Queen-sized bed if I feel like it. Or to let myself laugh with somebody or everybody or nobody at all. And mostly, to let the sensibility of Michelle guide me in not taking anything for granted and making every moment count, and letting Gerardo's sensibility guide me in finding ways to pursue new purpose and enjoy life not later, but now.