Buddy came home with us in the spring of 2012, a wriggling cream-coloured puppy in the back of my husband Mark's pickup truck. He was the kind of golden retriever you read about in books, all silly grin and soft eyes and an absolute refusal to walk past any patch of sunlight without lying down in it. He grew old with us. He saw two house moves, the birth of our daughter, the slow disappearance of his own muzzle into white. We thought we had more time.
He passed last March, on a Tuesday morning, in his bed by the back door. The vet said his heart simply gave out, which was both the kindest way and the cruellest, because there was no warning. One afternoon he was lying in the back garden chewing on a stick and the next morning he was gone. The week after, I could not walk past his empty spot in the hallway without my throat closing.
Finding FrameArto
A friend of mine had ordered a portrait of her own dog about a year before. I remember she had texted me a photo of the canvas hanging in her dining room and I had said something polite back, the way you do, without really looking. After Buddy died, I went back and found that text. The portrait was beautiful, soft watercolour, like a Beatrix Potter illustration come to life. I asked her where she got it. She sent me the FrameArto link.
I sat on it for about three weeks. There were a lot of memorial pet portrait services online, and most of them looked, I am sorry to say, a bit cheap. Stiff faces. Backgrounds that did not match the style. AI tells, the kind your eye catches before your brain does. FrameArto looked different. The samples on the watercolor page actually looked like watercolours, with the way the pigment pools at the edges and the soft halo of paper texture around the subject. So I uploaded the photo.
The photo I chose
I picked a photo I had taken on his last good afternoon. He was lying on his side in the back garden with one ear flopped over, the spring sun on his face, eyes half-closed in that bliss only old dogs and toddlers seem capable of. I had taken it without thinking. Just because he looked happy. I uploaded it that night, around eleven, on my laptop with a glass of wine in my hand. I half expected to give up halfway through. I did not.
I did not want a photo. I wanted the feeling of him. The way the kitchen sounded quieter without him in it. The watercolour gave that back to me in a way a photo never could.
The preview came back in about three minutes. There were three variations. The first was lovely but a bit too formal, the second had captured his expression but the background was a touch busy, and the third, the third was him. They had kept the soft afternoon light. They had kept the white on his muzzle. They had even kept the tilt of that one floppy ear. I sat there at the kitchen table at midnight and stared at it for a long time.
The canvas arrives
I ordered a medium canvas, sixteen by twenty inches, gallery-wrapped. It arrived nine days later in a sturdy box with a handwritten note tucked inside. Mark was at work. Our daughter Ellie was at school. I unwrapped it standing alone in the kitchen and the first time I looked at it I cried for ten minutes straight. Not sad crying. The kind of crying you do when something finally feels right after months of not feeling right at all.
I hung it that afternoon in the hallway, right above the spot where his bed used to be. When Mark got home he stopped in the doorway and just said, "oh." That was it. Oh. He has never been a particularly emotional man, but I watched him stand there for a long minute with his hands in his pockets, and then he went over and put his hand on the wall next to it, the way you would put a hand on a dog's head.
What changed
Ellie was four when Buddy died and she did not really understand. For weeks after, she kept asking where Buddy was, when was Buddy coming home, was Buddy lost. After we hung the portrait she came home from school and pointed at it and said, "that is Buddy in his garden." And she said it like she was relieved. Like she now knew where he was. He was in his garden, in the sun, with the one ear flopped over.
I have ordered two more portraits from FrameArto since. One was for my mother in law for Christmas, a portrait of her tortoiseshell cat. The other was a present to myself, a small print of Buddy as a puppy, for my desk. Both came back as gorgeous as the first. But the watercolour in the hallway is the one that mattered. It is the one that turned that empty spot into a kept spot. I will be grateful for it for the rest of my life.
If you are reading this because you lost a dog recently and you are trying to decide whether to do this, I will say only this. Pick the photo where they looked most like themselves. Not the most flattering one. The one where, when you scroll past it on your phone, you think, that is them. That is the one that will come back to you on the canvas. And you will not regret it.
“The first time I looked at it I cried for ten minutes straight. Not sad crying. The kind of crying you do when something finally feels right.”
Amanda R., Austin, Texas
