Garden & Golden
One door closes, another door opens. Parting with a home can be heartbreaking, especially if your green thumbs and golden paws cultivated a knockout garden like this! [We may have embellished a little bit, but make no mistake – this garden is 100% real!] So when the time comes to close that door, it’s important to honor your hard work. Honor yourself and your family with a home portrait that tells the story & paints the pretty picture of the place you made as home.
When Ellie sent me pictures of the house, albeit in the dead of winter, I knew this was going to be a spectacular portrait. She was beaming with pride over her luscious garden. She praised the purples, the yellows, and every color blooming on her land. I could feel the kaleidoscope of colors from just her enthusiasm. She reminisced over her Golden Retriever’s contributions to the garden, how he was always by her side, gallantly digging in the dirt. He had passed the previous year, and now she was getting ready to move. So much of what Ellie adored in this house, her family, her flowers, her memories, and her late golden retriever, was coming to an end. She was eager to celebrate this life with a portrait of all the colorful details she calls “home.”
The process was seamless, on time, and I really appreciate her talent — that garden on the big house is not (yet) here in reality; it’s a McKenzie did a fantastic job capturing the details of our old and new homes, AND our doggies’ personalities! Knowing that I love to garden and will eventually have one at the new house, McKenzie asked permission to create a garden in the painting. She painted a garden that’s complimentary and true to the style of the house, that I’ll probably use as a plan in reality. The whole process was easy and McKenzie is a delightful collaborator!
-Ellie
English Rogue Garden
Ellie loved her portrait so much, she commissioned Monarch again to create a portrait of her new house with her new paw-tners! The new house was much bigger and took on an English or Nantucket style of architecture. It was dreamy, somewhat of an old world fairy tale. But then, there was the front yard. A large framed lot with little vegetation, suffocated by sand gravel. There was no way I was going to incorporate a sand lot as the front yard of Ellie’s new fairy tale house. Not when I’ve seen what she can do. I reached out to Ellie and asked, my only request in creating this portrait is if I can render the garden in my mind’s eye, inspired by Ellie’s enthusiasm and by the home’s fairy tale charm. It was a bold ask, possibly insulting, but Ellie was thrilled! We shared pictures and insights, and we named this portrait, English Rogue Garden.
The process was seamless, on time, and I really appreciate her talent — that garden on the big house is not (yet) here in reality; it’s a gravel parking lot. Based on my old garden, she asked if she could go “rogue” with a garden, and I love that she created one that’s true to the house architecture; I might just got myself a blue print for the garden.
-Ellie