Blog / 2008 / Paint Your Life

PaintYourLife.com creates paintings from any photo you give them. Their motto is “you capture it, our artists will paint it,” and that’s precisely what they do—for very little money.

The paintings are handmade, but they certainly don’t qualify as original. The finished product has zero personality.

It’s only with some digging that the truth about Paint Your Life comes out. The company provides a Painter’s Forum (accessible only through the FAQ section) where aspiring artists can ask Paint Your Life’s professionals technical questions.

The forum doesn’t seem to be particularly popular, and one of the few posts questions the company’s ability to provide the service it does for such surprisingly low prices. The answer is a depressing commentary on the state of our world economy as well as on the way that some people view the work an artist does:

“Paint Your Life doesn’t use any computers or printers in order to paint a portrait, our artists paint only 100% handmade. the reason that our prices are low is because we own a studio in Asia and all our artists are highly talented in painting portraits, they can paint much faster than most painters in the western world. In general, artists don’t have stable orders and therefore they must charge a high price for each painting (because they can’t know when will he get another painting order). Paint Your Life has many orders per month so each of our painters feel secure in having a stable work and therefore the price is lower than an independent artist.”

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. So why do I keep thinking about the company and what it does?

I guess that I’m just a sucker for “making special.” Though Paint Your Life is just one more case of uninspired craft being passed off as real art to the wider community, it at least has the customization factor. It’s not another Hallmark hotel room Thomas Kinkade cookie cutter version of art. It’s your life that the company is painting.

And I happen to think that there’s something to that. It’s true that detractors of portraiture in the fine art world can point to Paint Your Life as the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the genre, but at least the company is beginning to put value back into a certain kind of individuality that must be custom produced, if not original.

In some strange way, Paint Your Life is a kind of comfort to me. I’m happy that people still want painted portraits of themselves in their homes—even if they don’t want them badly enough to pay a slow, independent, non-sweatshop artist like me.