Canmore artist and Outlook cartoonist Patrick LaMontagne learned recently that if you take the time to do the work you love, the universe will respond in kind.
As a way to step aside from his work as a commercial artist, LaMontagne set out in November to paint a digital portrait of actor Martin Sheen’s character Tom from the movie The Way written and directed by Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez.
A movie LaMontagne said he loves, The Way is about a father, Tom, who travels to Spain to retrieve the remains of his son, played by Estevez, who was killed while hiking in the French Pyrenees during a storm. Tom decides to complete his son’s trek along the Camino de Santiago, an 800-kilometre pilgrimage that stretches from the Pyrenees into northwest Spain.
“(Tom) starts out as this really angry closed off guy and by the end of the movie he realizes he’s part of a larger community,” LaMontagne said. “It’s one of those sleeper hits. A lot of people have seen it now, but it didn’t get a lot of awards.
“To listen to them talk about it in interviews, it’s one of the films they are most proud of doing and then there was a memoir that followed called The Long Way. It’s about the lives of Emilio and Martin Sheen, about their lives growing up from the son’s perspective and the father’s perspective and their own careers.
“It’s a great memoir and after reading it and seeing the movie I decided this would be a good thing to paint.”
In December, when he finished the painting, entitled Tom’s Road, shortly before Christmas, he posted the image he had rendered of a man looking towards the sky and seemingly at peace with the world to his portfolio on his website, cartoonink.com, and shared the painting with Estevez via the actor’s Twitter account.
He had done the same with portraits of Sylvester Stallone as an aging boxer in the movie Rocky Balboa and Harry Morgan, who played Col. Potter in the TV series MASH.
“I had tagged them on Twitter, and nothing happened, and I never tried to make anything happen since. When I tagged Emilio Estevez on Twitter I really didn’t expect a response and I got one in two hours.
“When he contacted me before Christmas he asked to buy a print and he said if I don’t want to sell it that’s fine, but he loved the piece and have a Merry Christmas.”
Estevez, who starred in ’80s films like The Breakfast Club and Young Guns, had hoped to give his father a print for Christmas.
“I contacted him and said with only five business days to Christmas there’s no way that I’m going to be able to get a proof, but I said if you want to wait until January we can do it then.”
LaMontagne’s goal with these portraits of movie and TV characters is not to make money or earn notoriety, but simply for the pleasure of painting memorable characters without the demands of deadlines or invoices.
“Everything I had been doing was for work and to be honest I was feeling a little depressed and I needed something that would make the world fun again, so I did this piece just because I really loved the movie.
“There’s no commercial value to it. I never had any intention of selling it or promoting it. I was just putting it into my portfolio as something I enjoyed doing.”
Shortly afterwards, however, LaMontagne received another e-mail from Estevez saying his mother, Janet Templeton, wanted to know if they could buy the original.
As there’s no real “original” with digital paintings, LaMontagne certified an 18-by-24 inch canvas-stretched print as the original. And given that LaMontagne had never set out to sell the painting, even though Estevez kept offering to pay, he asked that Estevez pay only the cost of printing and shipping; an amount that came to just over $200.
“I didn’t make any money and it didn’t cost me any money,” he said. “Estevez even offered to have Martin sign a bunch of prints that I could sell and I said ‘no.’”
Instead, LaMontagne asked for a photograph of Sheen and Estevez with the painting and signed by both that he could hang in his office and a second copy that he could donate to a charity auction.
While he said he has received feedback from other artists telling him he should have sold the print to Estevez and not given it to him for free, LaMontagne said he has good reasons.
“The reason I didn’t charge was I did the painting because I was doing it for myself and gut instinct said if I sell this, if I say five grand, it is going to ruin everything,” he said.
“I’m a commercial artist,” he explained. “I’ve learned my lesson not to do free work. It was just this piece was special. And I knew that if I sold this particular piece it would be like slapping the universe in the face for letting me learn the lesson that I should do more personal work.
“It was almost like here’s a little reward for doing the right thing for doing some personal work.
And given the way the universe works, if LaMontagne had purposefully set out to make this happen, it simply couldn’t have: the universe just doesn’t work that way,
“If I had done this to try and get his attention nothing would have happened. It wouldn’t have worked.”
Tom’s Road is now hanging in Sheen’s Malibu, Calif. home and that is the best part of this process – that and the compliment Estevez paid LaMontagne’s work.
“The quote was,” LaMontagne said, ‘You’ve captured my father in the way few have.’ That was the best part of it. That was the best compliment I could have been paid,” he said.
“If none of this had happened I would still enjoy the painting just as much. I really did enjoy the painting.”
