Christmas Promo: Up Your Game and Get a Painting of Your Boat for a Hundred Bucks

Anyone who upgrades to a paid subscription by November 23 is eligible to purchase a painting of their own boat or someone else’s by contemporary fine artist Osiris Salomón Santos of the Dominican Republic. Naturally, existing paid subscribers are also eligible.

Santos is a friend who painted Loose Cannon’s ketch from a photo of Rio underway in the Bahamas.

There are two sizes to choose from: 20 by 24 inches for $100 and 24 by 30 inches for $150. (Rio is the latter.) The medium is acrylic on canvas, which is ideal for shipping.

Speaking of which, we must tack on $36 onto those prices to cover our shipping costs, first to the U.S. and then via the Postal Service.

Paintings will be sent to their purchasers via USPS Priority Mail in the first week of December.

My Man Salomón

Santos works from a studio in Sosua on the North Coast of the Dominican Republic. He is considered a contemporary fine artist, though he makes much of his living painting portraits for tourists who travel there on beach vacations, usually working from photos.

Share

The key to Santos’ productivity and reasonable pricing is his use of a wide-format printer to reproduce the image on the canvas itself, which he then paints over. Before you say that this is some form of cheating, you should know that artists of the last century often achieved similar results by sketching over an image from an overhead projector.

Before that—and going back to the late 1500s—artists employed what was called a camera obscura to project scenes through a pinhole onto a surface such as paper or canvas, thus helping those old masters sketch out a scene.

As far as the topic at hand—using photography as a tool for a painter—the pinhole camera brings this discussion full circle. In the first half of the 19th century this technology was refined to expose light-sensitive materials to the projected image, and so photography was born.

Now, enough tech talk and onto the fun—and more tech talk. We can also use ChatGPT to re-render your photo into the style of famed nautical painters of yore, or any recognizable artist for the matter—before Santos applies his brush strokes. As a demonstration, I am showing how Rio would look, if she had been painted by:

The Process

Here is the process to get your own boat painting:

1. Sign up for, or upgrade to a paid subscription.
2. New people and existing paid subscribers (We know who you are) should then email the photo they would like to see as a painting to petercswanson@gmail.com. The email must be received by November 23. Include your physical mailing address.
3. If you want your painting to be done in the style of a particular artist, include that info. We will send you the re-rendered image for approval.
4. Once Santos has finished the painting. He will email you a picture of the picture, and an invoice for the price of the painting plus $36 for shipping. He will include instructions on how to pay via Moneygram.
5. You pay. We deliver.

And that’s it. The painting will come by mail, rolled into a triangular shipping tube. It will be insured. You will then have to have it stretched for framing or attach it to the side of that big fridge of yours with magnets.