Christina Peters, christinapetersfineart.com, has been taking pictures since she was eight years old. After her second photography degree from Art Center College of Design in 1993, she became an award winning commercial food photographer for 26 years (see christinapeters.com). She states, “My personal work is celebrating the beauty of natural foods that come straight from the earth or the oceans.” Her “Kaleidoscope of Food” images have been acquired in several art collections, with a few of those being children’s healthcare facilities in California. I am very grateful that Christina has written this article in which she generously shares important details about her experiences working with art consultants. ~ Renée Phillips, Editor
Working With Art Consultants On Unique Projects
By Christina Peters
Recently, some of my images have been used in an interesting, non-conventional manner with very little-to-no production work on my end for the finished installed pieces. One of the projects was directly with a printer who was contracted by a healthcare facility to source images, and have them turned into murals that were permanently affixed to the walls.
The lab was Blowup lab in San Francisco. Carol Covington, owner of Blowup Lab, was the art consultant on the project. Carol found my website and selected several images. I licensed my images to her as a one-time display usage license for a flat fee per image. I retained all rights to my work. I sent my files to Carol, and her team digitally enlarged my files for the project. Her team also handled the entire installation process. I didn’t have to do anything for the install.
Carol was very sweet to work with and extremely respectful of my work. She made sure the integrity of my work remained intact. I was extremely happy with how my images looked as murals. My images were printed onto ECO (PVC Free) wall cover media as 5 foot square murals.
Another project done in a similar manner was for the Sutter Pacific Family Medicine building in San Francisco, on the 7th floor, where the Stanford Children’s Health Center is. The art consultant on this project was Nancy Witherell. Nancy curated 485 pieces of art for this building, and was very fun to work with. She placed art on multiple floors.
What was fascinating about this project was the design and construction. The interior of the building was built with pre-fabricated panels that were made by DIRRT in Canada, and trucked in.
All the artwork was printed on 2mm thick glass, which was applied to the pre-fabricated panels, and installed on site. I had 12 images used in this project in the examination rooms on the 7th floor. The images looked just as luscious in person as they did on my monitor. They are totally flush mounted in the walls.
Nancy selected all kinds of artwork for this installation. For this project, I had to send her large files at scale. So for my work, that meant digital files that were 40 inches wide by 300 DPI. Many of my images selected were not that size, so I used Alien Skin’s Blowup software to enlarge my files, and it worked very well. Artists who were painters, or who had mixed media had to have their work photographed at a very high resolution. If that was not an option (maybe the piece selected had been photographed at a smaller resolution and no longer available), they would have to take their existing digital files and get those enlarged like I did.
Working on projects like these is not for everyone. If you are the type of artist who needs to have control of the finished art creation process from start to finish, this way of working with art consultants might not be for you. I call this type of work a translation of the original work. Each medium/substrate will have it’s own inherent qualities to it that may be slightly different, or very different from the original piece. The artist must be ok with that translation of their work.
So, if you are open to this way of working with consultants, then you’ll see your work in a way you never expected or even imagined, and it’s pretty fun. I’m honored to be in these spaces, and really hope that my images can brighten someone’s day, or if they are a patient there, going through something stressful – maybe my images can distract them for just a minute or two from the stress they are feeling.
Visit Christina Peters’ Websites
christinapetersfineart.com
christinapeters.com
foodphotographyclub.com
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