Making brushwork their business

We tend to think of art as a pure expression of creative energy, governed by nothing but the artist’s imagination and, perhaps, the physics of brush on canvas.

That is certainly how Chapin’s student artists experience it, whether they are testing the limits of their photographic eye or sketching based on a scene in the park.

But what happens when you need to make money from art?

Two members of the Class of 1991, Eve Gianni Corio and Laura Mendelson Hill, visited Chapin to talk about the creative benefits and compromises they’ve encountered in their two-year-old art business, Lillunia. Their enterprise, which turns watercolors of wild animals by Laura and fellow artist Deborah Bassino into giclée prints for children’s bedrooms, reflects the exact mix of whimsy and practicality needed to thrive in the world of selling art.

“We are trying to take fine art and commercialize it without losing its integrity,” Laura explained.

Laura planted the seeds of the business in 2007, the year that Eve — one of her oldest childhood friends — had her first child, Anya. The gift that Laura brought to Eve’s baby shower was a beautiful, personalized watercolor painting of a family of giraffes. Eve was captivated by how it brought to life the warm, nurturing feeling of motherhood. She hung it in Anya’s nursery and wondered how she could market Laura’s art to a wider audience of parents much like herself.

Eve knew that Laura could never paint custom watercolors fast enough to keep up with demand, so they found a process by which her works are digitized and then reproduced as prints, in series of about 500. Adding a digital layer to Laura’s creations allowed a new range of creative flexibility: They could use Photoshop to customize borders, crop larger images into detail shots, and make other changes to suit each customer’s needs.

“It’s about making the art work well in the environment where it will be going,” Eve said.

This challenged Eve and Laura to make their clients happy while remaining true to their artistic ideals and the message of conservation that underlies their work, which depicts wild animals — lions, monkeys, elephants, polar bears — in natural settings.

“Our project is educational at its heart,” Laura said. “We can teach kids early on that they need to become stewards of this environment that we all share.”

While this means that some people’s first requests are out — no typical nursery barnyard scenes, for instance — Eve and Laura have become adept at guiding their clients toward subjects that fulfill their desires and remain true to Lillunia’s purpose.

“It’s a balance,” Laura said. “You can’t just work for the commercial audience, or your art will no longer have its meaning and its vision.”