How to Commission an Oil Painting in Dubai: What Actually Happens

People often write to me and begin with an apology. They say they are not sure how this works, or they hope it is not a strange question. It is never a strange question. Commissioning a painting is simply not something most people do very often, and there is no reason it should feel obvious.

So I want to describe it plainly. Not the romantic version, but the real one: what I ask, what you decide, how long it takes, what it costs, and where it can go wrong.

A commission starts with a conversation, not a brief

The first message usually contains a photograph. A wall. A hallway. A living room with the sofa already in place and one empty space above it. Sometimes a person sends me a picture of a painting they love and says, something like this, but for me.

All of that is useful. But the first thing I want to know is not the size. It is what you want to feel when you walk into that room.

That sounds abstract, so I make it concrete with questions:

• What time of day are you usually in this room?
• Is this a room where you rest, or where you receive people?
• What is already on the walls, and what is the light like at four in the afternoon?
• Is there a colour you cannot live with?

That last question saves more commissions than any other. Many people know exactly what they do not want long before they know what they do.

Somewhere in this conversation the painting begins to appear. Not the image, but the temperature of it. Quiet or loud. Warm or cool. Something you look at, or something you look into.

Photographs, references and honesty

If the commission is a portrait, I ask for photographs, and I ask for more of them than you will expect. Not studio portraits. Ordinary ones. A person laughing badly. A person not paying attention to the camera. Those are the images that tell me how someone actually holds their face.

If the commission is abstract or a landscape, references still help, but they work differently. A fabric swatch, a photograph of the sea in a specific place, the interior of a hotel you liked. I am not copying any of it. I am learning the register you respond to.

I will also tell you honestly if I think an idea will not work. If someone asks me for a very dark, heavy composition for a bright, minimal room, I will say so before we start rather than after. That conversation is uncomfortable for about two minutes and saves months.

Size, format and the wall

Size is the part people underestimate.

Almost every collector I have worked with initially chose a size that was too small. A painting needs air around it, but it also needs to hold the wall. A canvas that is technically large in a shop feels small above a three-seat sofa.

My practical rule: the painting should be roughly two thirds the width of the furniture beneath it. If nothing is beneath it, it should be large enough that you notice it from the doorway.

I ask for a photograph of the wall with something of known size in the frame — a chair, a door, a person standing against it. Then I mock the canvas into that photograph so you can see the proportion before anything is stretched. It takes me an hour and it has changed the size of about half the commissions I have made.

Format matters too. Dubai apartments and villas often have tall, uninterrupted walls with a lot of vertical space, and a portrait-format canvas can be far more satisfying there than the landscape format people instinctively ask for.

The sketch stage

Once we agree on direction and size, I make preliminary studies. Usually two or three, sometimes in colour, sometimes only in tone. These are not miniature versions of the final painting. They are proposals about structure — where the weight sits, where the eye enters, where the quiet part of the canvas is.

You choose one, or you choose parts of two, and I combine them.

This is the last moment for a large change. After this point, revisions become expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money: an oil painting that has been argued with too many times begins to look tired. The paint knows. So I front-load the disagreement into the sketch stage, deliberately.

Painting, and why I go quiet

Then I paint, and I mostly stop talking.

I send progress images at two points: once when the composition is fully laid in, and once when the painting is close to finished. Some artists send weekly updates. I have found this does not serve the collector well. An oil painting passes through genuinely ugly stages. Layers go down that will be almost entirely covered. If you see the painting at week two, you will worry, and then I will be reassuring you instead of working.

If you would prefer more frequent updates, tell me at the start and I will do it. But I will warn you first.

Oil needs time between layers. This is the part of the process that cannot be compressed, and it is the honest reason a commission takes as long as it does. If someone promises you a large oil painting in ten days, they are either working very thinly or they are not using oil.

Timeline and cost

Timelines, in my studio, in practice:

• Small work, up to 60 × 80 cm: four to six weeks
• Medium, around 100 × 70 cm: six to ten weeks
• Large or multi-panel: ten to sixteen weeks
• Add two to three weeks in summer, because humidity slows drying

Price depends on size, medium and complexity, and I quote a fixed figure before we begin — not a range that moves later. There are no surprise costs at the end. Framing, crating and shipping are quoted separately and clearly, because collectors reasonably want to see those as their own numbers.

Payment is normally split: a deposit to reserve the studio time and begin work, the balance on completion before delivery. The deposit is what allows me to turn down other work for that period, which is the actual thing it protects.

You can get a feeling for my price range by looking at the available works in the collection — commissions sit in a similar band for a similar size.

What you receive

Every original work leaves my studio with a signed certificate of authenticity recording the title, dimensions, medium, year and a photograph of the painting itself. If you ever sell or insure the work, this is the document that matters.

For collectors in the UAE I deliver personally where I can. Internationally, works ship rolled or stretched depending on size and destination, professionally packed and insured. I have sent paintings to Europe, the GCC and beyond without incident, but I will always tell you honestly which method I would choose for your particular piece.

The honest caveats

Three things worth saying directly.

A commission is not a reproduction service. If you want an exact copy of an existing painting, mine or anyone's, I am not the right artist. What I can do is work in the same language.

A commission is not faster than buying an available work. If you need something on the wall before guests arrive next month, buy something finished.

And a commission requires you to let go a little. You are choosing a painter because of how that painter sees. If every decision is specified in advance, you have not commissioned a painting, you have ordered one, and the result usually shows it.

The commissions I am proudest of all had the same quality: the collector was clear about the feeling and generous about the execution.

Where to start

If you are considering it, send me the room. A photograph, the approximate dimensions, and a sentence about what you want that space to feel like. That is genuinely enough to begin.

You can write to me through the enquiry page, or see what I am currently working on in the collection. If you would rather understand my practice before committing to anything, my studio walkthrough shows how a painting is actually built, layer by layer.

There is no obligation in an enquiry. Most conversations I have about commissions do not become paintings, and that is entirely fine. The ones that do are usually better for the conversation.