The trust has gone. By Australian Art Blogger Rob Kennedy

The trust has gone. By Australian Art Blogger Rob Kennedy

Years ago, getting permission from someone to paint something they owned or had an interest in was fairly easy. Now it's harder than extracting teeth.

I remember the night when I decided to paint wine more than the other stuff that I liked painting. I'd painted a Taylors Shiraz at the same time Thomas Arvid was carving his way into history as the “premier painter of wine”. I enjoyed the results and at that time hadn't even heard of Arvid. I still wanted to paint trains, planes, ferries and wildlife, but wine was going to be “my thing”. That night I tapped out a letter to three prominent wine makers, and the first reply came back within minutes. Chris Ringland was all for it, basically saying “go ahead, would love to see what you do”. Forty minutes later I got the go ahead from The III Associates” (now Thicker than Water Wines), and the next day a third reply, “that's okay, but it needs to be painted in a favourable light”.

Now when I ask there's mostly just dead silence. This is after a short but informative cover letter basically saying that there was: no charge, no obligation to buy, I will pay for the product, I don't want anything for free, all I want is your go ahead for no other reason than to let you know what I'd like to do and I don't want to step on anyone's toes. You'd think that the body of work on my website might help and I guess it does push my request over the line from time to time but I'm not so sure anymore.

I always like to ask for permission to stop wasting a canvas. Once I was halfway through doing a bottle of Australian rum and thought, maybe they ought to know. The response still staggers me. The reply was no doubt drafted by a lawyer and basically (distilled if you like), they said “no”, but not in so few words. There was an appraisal of the appropriate intellectual property laws. This was followed by details on how any profit I made could be recovered through the courts...”

Yeah, the painting never got finished and I've still got it as a stark reminder that not everyone or company are keen to help.

I decided to change my position and approach smaller family owned businesses, bypass the corporate lawyers, so to speak. My flawed thinking was that they'd be pleased with a little extra publicity or even flattered that anyone would like their product enough to want to spend time painting it. Not so. I send my letter and most times don't even get a response. It became quite costly insomuch that I'd end up buying a bottle of wine before sending the letter just to get a feel for the bottle and the contents. Nearly all wine and spirit bottles are seriously edited in photoshop or similar to take out any unwanted glare, reflections, or lit from behind to make gorgeous colours. Beer often appears cold and dripping with moisture. Painters tend to paint what they see and I wanted the bottle and the contents to decide. One wine I tasted was so bad or had “no intervention” that I had to force myself to drink the rest of the bottle after the first glass.

Why might one ask. It isn't so much of a battle over intellectual property rights but, I think one of absolute fear of, "what's going to happen if we say yes”. I asked for permission or a blessing to paint one wine and the owners said yes. However, by the time I'd started painting, the owners must have changed their mind or thought I was scamming them. I like to send a “Work in Progress” update for anything significant in the painting. The winemakers that are happy for me to paint their wine are usually very happy to watch me make mistakes, correct them and watch the journey with me. This winemaker wouldn't even acknowledge that I was even alive.  They never said "stop, we've changed our mind" and I ended up completing the painting with not a word of encouragement for my work. I was gutted and I still think about it occasionally.

Now, it's easier to see the reasons for the silence. I get a daily email from banks I'm not even a customer of telling me my access has been suspended. The daily ritual of sorting through what seems like a dozen legitimate requests or warnings is abrasive.

The fear of being scammed more or less paralyses people and I'm no different. It seems that there's not a second that someone isn't trying to put their hand in your pocket to help themselves out of the last few cents that you've got left. Scammers and arseholes in general are to blame in my opinion. In their quest to rip people off, people are now petrified just to answer the phone, and when we watch the news and see people lose their life savings it's no damned wonder why.

It's way easier to shut up than take a risk, no matter how comforting and reasonable the request is. For artists, the whole idea of just sitting behind an easel and painting is a quickly evaporating dream. And for those of us that care enough to ask, it's getting harder every day.