Our Christmas gift! More art by Ryan Graeff (The Restitution Press)

For Christmas, J and I decided what we wanted most of all was to give each other a commissioned painting by Ryan Graeff - an artist we discovered while furniture shopping for our new house. We saw his artwork in a furniture gallery at Helms Bakery and the color, love of place, graphic nature, true LA vibe and street art influences really grabbed us. We tracked the artist down and bought a fantastic painting of his in the fall and we saved the huge spot over our fireplace for a larger commissioned piece.
Ryan is not only a fantastic artist, he's a great person to work with. He's warm and generous and insanely talented. He's also getting some really big breaks and when we picked up this painting last week, he told us that he's now signed contracts with more galleries and even a design firm to do work for their clients.
We didn't know if it would be too much to ask for him to include many of our family's personal landmarks in the piece, but he was happy to oblige and the end result is an amazing painting where every single element of it has memories attached for our family. We are beyond excited about this piece. He even made two copies of it and let us pick our favorite. (The price of his work is rising so quickly that the second piece is already worth 3x what we paid for it, he told us -- AS IF we would ever sell this treasure!)
Anyhow, I had to share.