A spectrum of how work is chosen — from the constraint of commission to the freedom of following one's own eye.
What you're looking at
A horizontal axis from commissioned work (left, red) to self-directed inquiry (right, green). Nine projects arranged not by date but by how much they were shaped by a patron's demand versus my own obsession. The commissioned work sits in rectangles — containment, obligation. The self-directed studies sit in ellipses — organic, unbounded. The horse monument straddles the middle: paid for, never finished, but I learned more about equine anatomy than any patron cared to know.
Why I drew it this way
The spectrum is not a timeline. I have worked on the Duke's portrait and the bird flight notebooks in the same season. The distinction is not when but why — what determined the subject, the pace, the criteria for completion. Rectangles for commissions because a contract is a box. Ellipses for free inquiry because the work expands to fill the time I give it, which is all the time I have. The Last Supper sits closer to center than the portrait because, though paid for, I treated the wall as a problem of perspective and shadow that interested me more than the client's devotional needs.
What it argues
That the best work happens in the middle or drifts rightward. The Duke's portrait is competent and dead. The heart dissection will never earn a florin but it is the only place I have drawn the truth about how blood moves. A commission can fund inquiry, but it cannot be inquiry. The patron wants the thing finished; I want to know why the thing is the shape it is.
What I left out
War machines. They belong on this spectrum — designed on commission, but I slow-walked them deliberately, made them beautiful and impractical, so they would not be built. They are commissions I sabotaged from within. I left them out because they complicate the axis: work done because of the patron's gold but against the patron's interest. That is a third color, and I have used my two.