PetPetArt was launched in 2016 as a service to deliver photos of pets as paintings.
My father, who was an artist, creates all the artwork and makes it unique. The work is all hand-drawn, of course, with no tracing or digital manipulation. I used pastels, watercolors, and other methods best suited to the model, based on photographs provided by the client.
If you have a pet as a family member, you have thousands and thousands of photos in your smartphone library. Preserving memories is important, but making a painting of a selected piece and hanging it in your home or office gives it a different feel than a photograph.
As the artist himself said, even if you are the same artist, you will never be able to paint the same picture twice. I know it’s an old saying, but what I deliver to the client is the only painting in the world, the only picture of my child in the world. This concept has been shared by many people, and through word of mouth, many people have purchased pet portraits.
In the summer of 2021, my father passed away, and I was no longer able to deliver pet portraits based on my previous concept. I had been receiving offers to do so during his illness, but due to the fact that I could not maintain the quality of my work, I could not even respond to them, and I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for that.
The other day, when I was cleaning out my studio, I found about 20 pet portraits that were painted between 2016 and 2018. They range from rough drafts and exercises to simple framed portraits, but they all have lively expressions.
It seems to me that my father continued to create works of art with the idea that the entire process of “being created with some kind of will, passing into someone’s hands, being appreciated, eventually becoming a part of the space, and then one day disappearing” is art. I feel that my father continued to create works of art with the idea that all of these processes are part of art. I hope that the portraits found in his studio will also pass through these processes and disappear.
From painting to analog photography, and from analog photography to digital photography, technology has advanced to the point where “images” can be easily reproduced. In today’s society, digital art that can be reproduced is often considered to be of little value, but in 2021, NFT (Non-Fungible Token) art is attracting attention.
The “non-substitutable” nature of NFT is similar to the concept of “the only picture of my child in the world” that PetPetArt has been delivering. As a first step, I would like to convert the pet portraits that have been left behind to NFT so that people can own and appreciate them.
Using NFT technology, digital art may be able to have the value of “aura” (something that exists only in the here and now) that Walter Benjamin advocated in his book.