What an Original Painting Carries | Claudia Klann Fine Art
I sell prints of my paintings, and I love that my work can be reproduced.
Actually, reproductions have allowed my art to travel much farther than I ever could.
A painting that began on an easel in my studio in Redding can become a print hanging in someone’s home across the country, or a greeting card that travels to another part of the world. I’ve had missionaries use my greeting cards with people who haven’t met Jesus yet.
Think about that. Something I painted here in my studio can end up halfway around the world, in the hands of someone I’ve never met, and become part of how someone else shares the love of Jesus.
I really love that.
So when I talk about the importance of owning original art, I’m not diminishing prints or reproductions at all. They’ve allowed what I create to go places the original painting—and I—may never go.
But an original is different. It just is.
If you’ve ever stood in front of an original oil painting, you probably know what I mean. Oil paint does something with light that’s very hard to capture in a photograph. I paint in layers, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, and there are brushstrokes and ridges and texture across the surface.
Put that painting in a room with natural light and it will change throughout the day. The light comes through the window and catches a brushstroke or a ridge of paint. It moves through a transparent layer and reflects back through the color. Walk past it from another direction and you may see something you didn’t see an hour ago.
That’s one of the things I love about oil.
But the physical qualities of the paint are only part of what an original painting carries.
And there’s something about that that feels very familiar to me because, as a believer in Jesus, I am also meant to reflect light—His light.
I bring who I am to the canvas. I bring what God has put in me, what He’s shown me, encounters I’ve had with Him, joy, hope, beauty, and also the things I’ve walked through with Him that weren’t particularly beautiful while I was living them.
How could I not bring all of that?
I pray while I paint. I worship. I talk to Jesus. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I have a pretty clear idea of what I’m trying to express, and sometimes I’m frustrated because the painting is absolutely NOT doing what I want it to do. 😂
But I’m creating out of who I am and what I carry, and I believe that gets released into the work.
I believe original art can actually change the atmosphere of a room. I’m comfortable talking about energy and frequency because I believe what we carry matters. What we give our attention to matters, and what we release through our creativity matters. When I create in relationship with Jesus, I believe His presence, His light and His glory affect what I create.
So I’ve been thinking about something we don’t talk about very much when we buy art: Who is the artist?
I don’t mean how famous they are, how many shows they’ve done or what their résumé looks like. I mean, what do they carry? What are they releasing through their work?
We put a lot of thought into how something will look in our homes. Will it work over the sofa? Is it the right size? Does it go with the rug? Of course those things matter.
But I also care about what I’m bringing into my home. I care about the atmosphere of the place where I live, where people gather, where I wake up in the morning and where ordinary life happens.
I think the art we choose becomes part of that atmosphere.
That’s certainly part of why I paint.
I want my paintings to carry light, beauty, hope, peace and glory. I want them to make room for encounter. Not everything I paint looks overtly Christian, and I don’t think it needs to.
I carry Him. So naturally, He comes with me to the canvas.
And that brings me back to the difference between an original and a reproduction.
A reproduction can take the image farther than the original ever could, which is one of the reasons I’m so grateful for them. But there is only one original canvas that I actually stood in front of.
Those are the marks my hand made. Those are the layers I put down, wiped off, changed, covered up and sometimes uncovered again. It was there for the whole messy process of figuring out what I was trying to say.
I prayed over that canvas. I spent hours with it. I created it with intention, and I believe something of that intention and atmosphere remains with the work.
Maybe that’s part of why selling an original can be bittersweet for me. Of course I want to sell my paintings. This is what I do, and there’s something wonderful about another person loving a painting enough to want to live with it.
But I’ve lived with it first.
Then one day someone carries it out of my studio and it becomes part of their home and their life.
I like thinking about where it will hang. The conversations that will happen around it. The ordinary days when no one is paying much attention to it at all, and then one morning the light will come through the window differently and they’ll notice something in it they hadn’t noticed before.
And I hope over time the painting continues to give something to the room and the people who live there. I hope it brings peace or joy or hope. I hope sometimes it causes someone to become more aware of the presence of God.
The same oil paint that caught the light in my studio will now catch the light coming through someone else’s windows and reflect it into their room.
And in a very real way, that’s what I was trying to do when I painted it in the first place.
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