One family, one hall, four chapters.

Painted Holidays is the holiday wing of a family of artists—the same studio that paints cats, wolves, houses and the family dog. We built it because the holiday art we kept being sent was one look with the colours swapped: orange in October, red in December. That is a costume, not a tradition. Most of the AI work doesn’t resonate with us either.

So each chapter here has its own painters behind it, thirty traditions to a room — two thirds of them antique, the rest the way the holiday looks now. Halloween runs from the 1920s die-cut parlour and Rackham’s ink to a Sleepy Hollow nocturne, on two shelves. Thanksgiving is Currier & Ives, the Brandywine illustrators, egg tempera and the magazine covers of the 1940s. Christmas is Nast’s engravings, Bruegel in the snow, the Victorian card and the tree at seven in the morning. New Year’s is Leyendecker, Barbier, Klimt’s gold and a Whistler nocturne with fireworks in it. None of the four would recognise the others.

What every room keeps is you. The faces, the coats, the dog and the front of your house are held exactly as you sent them, and a judge scores every painting for likeness before you see it. This is the one site in our family where we paint children: a parent or guardian signs for every photograph with a child in it, the darker Halloween shelf is closed to them, every painting with a child is checked twice before it is shown, and a person looks once more before it is printed. We built that wall before we built the rooms.

Three paintings come back from one photograph, watermarked, before you pay. We take parts of your life and make them even more beautiful, and we hope that you find at least one piece of new art here that you like.

We are a family of artists, passionate about the act of creation. Some of us have been creating for seventy years. We recognize that times change, so we decided to embrace them: the speed of creating art has accelerated, and ideas become reality in days or weeks rather than months or years.

This studio began with a realization—nearly all of the AI art we see doesn’t inspire us—and with the idea that we could build something better. If we are successful, the oil paintings we create in our own studio can hang in our own homes and don’t need to be advertised to support our family.