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The art world isn’t the easiest nut to crack. Too often, it seems, an artist doesn’t make it until he’s dead, and then it’s way too late to reap the benefits – be they monetary compensation or good old-fashioned bragging rights.
But when your painting is hand-picked by an actor/director to hang on the wall of the main character’s apartment in a movie hitting theaters next year?
Yeah, that guy’s probably made it.
And that guy is Todd Young.
Young kind of fell into painting. After his junior high art classes, he didn’t pick up a paintbrush again until about 2000 – when he opened an unused art set he’d bought his wife.
“It sat around a few years unopened,” Young said. “Some of the paint was stiff. I had never painted, and finally … I broke out the art set and started goofing around with that. I was pretty bad.”
To learn, he studied the masters “like crazy,” Young said – Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko – “and that helped a lot.”
Fast-forward 10 years, when Nia Vardalos – of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” fame – sees Young’s work on Yessy.com, a Web site for artists, and decides she wants the painting to hang on her character’s apartment wall in the romantic comedy “I Hate Valentine’s Day,” scheduled to hit theaters next year.
And to think Young didn’t even want to join Yessy; he didn’t think he’d make much money on it.
“A week after I committed and paid our money, the set production company (for ‘I Hate Valentine’s Day’) e-mailed us,” said Nina Young, Todd’s wife, who handles the business aspect of Todd Young Art.
The Youngs’ home has the feel of a mini-warehouse, minus the dank air and exposed ceiling piping. No, there are no boxes stacked against walls or cranes parked in the back. It’s just a normal Fort Wayne home with a kitchen, living room and bedrooms upstairs.
But everywhere you turn, there are paintings. Stacked against the wall in piles, lined up and depicting forest scenes or flower scenes, sometimes featuring a teeny dog with his back to the viewer, observing the bright acrylic landscape about him.
In fact, that teeny dog seems to be everywhere. What’s up with that?
The Youngs laugh at the question. Todd’s mother used to have Scottish terriers. He’s more of a border collie and German shepherd kind of guy (those make appearances in his work, too). The dog gives Todd’s work a certain style and quirk. Paintings of flowers and forest and scenery abound, but when there’s a teeny black dog gazing at that full moon, cozy in the surf or flying in a red biplane in front of perfect puffy clouds? Instant appeal.
Apparently, it works. Young’s paintings have been the family’s sole source of income since Nina quit her job at a bank five years ago. The family is better off now than it was then.
For the first year or two after Todd became the sole bread-winner, it was a little rough, he said. The family had saved extra money in anticipation of the switch, but the two still found themselves clipping a few more coupons than before.
“We’d buy the store-brand peanut butter,” Todd said with a chuckle. “Now we can eat the Jiffy again.”
Todd has sold work in some local galleries, but his primary source of sales is the Internet. The Youngs have sold Todd’s work on eBay for years, more recently foraying into Etsy – a site geared toward handmade pieces – and Yessy, the site through which Vardalos found Todd.
Though the Youngs didn’t receive much cash for his work – a token fee, as the production company called it – Todd will be mentioned in the film’s credits, with a thank you for the painting – a series of two pieces depicting a forest scene at sunset.
There was no time to send in the original piece, so the company recreated the work from an 8-megabyte file Nina e-mailed in July.
“The next day,” Todd said, “they sent an e-mail and said, ‘It’s on the set. It looks great.’ ”
jyouhana@jg.net
