Here at Redstone Studios, we paint one-of-a-kind maps on canvas for private clients, companies, and organizations. We’ve mapped treks, safaris, road trips, honeymoons, life histories, family migrations, ancestral homes, private retreats, golf courses, schools, inns, historic districts and ecological regions. Our clients commission us to commemorate journeys, accomplishments, and beloved places. Some of our maps portray high adventure in exotic locations; others celebrate quieter pleasures. Whatever the case, all of them reflect not just geography but human spirit as well.
Cartography represents a marriage of art and science. It is this marriage that interests us, and one we like to perpetuate. Our maps are accurate, but they are also (we hope) beautiful. Some of our canvases exhibit the elaborate elements found in Renaissance maps: borders, cartouches, elaborate lettering and illustrations. Or, if we employ the decorative motifs and palette of the region we’re mapping. We also paint maps in a contemporary style. In fact, we are happy to design maps in any style vocabulary.
Each map we make tells a story. One, entitled “It’s a Jungle Out There,” shows the travels of a couple who circled the globe at the equator, looking at animal species; another documents a couple’s journey to China to pick up their adoptive baby girl; another traces the routes of a retired submarine captain. We’ve mapped Civil War experiences for the great-grandchildren of soldiers, a tiger reserve in India for a documentary filmmaker, a turkey plantation in Alabama, a wedding week in Tuscany, a private pilot’s trip from Nantucket to Cape Town, an antique-car rally in British Columbia, a birdwatcher’s trip to Antarctica, an Oregon family’s annual summer vacation in the Cascades. Over the years, we’ve made hundreds of maps, each of them unique.
Some of our maps serve as public art. For the Beacon Institute in Beacon, NY, we mapped the Hudson River and—more challenging—its watershed, whose boundaries we delineated using a wealth of sources from detailed USGS maps to the latest in satellite technology. We surrounded the actually cartography with illustrations showing various aspects—cultural, historical, and scientific—of the Hudson. The result is a map that honors the river and educates students and the public about the watershed. For New Alliance Bank in New Haven, we painted a map showing New Haven’s historic nine squares, founded in he seventeenth century and still vital. The 10 x 10’ painting hangs in the bank’s lobby.
Here’s how the mapmaking process works: you commission a map to commemorate or promote a place, either for yourself or—as is often the case—as a personal or corporate gift. You specify the geography; together we consider style, focus, color and various elements we might want to incorporate into the canvas: a key, inset map(s), decorative borders, a compass rose, a title, illustrations, charts, lists, poems, narratives, quotations. Prices vary according to size and complexity. Our standard size, 3 x 4 feet, begins at $10,000; our smallest size, 24 x 30 inches, begins at $5,000. Custom sizes are available, including large canvases suitable for lobbies, clubs, or public spaces.
With art printers Michael Suozzi and Robert Lyon of Tandem Editions, we are able to offer archival pigment prints for clients who want museum-quality reproductions of their Redstone Studios original maps, or for businesses and organizations who would like prints to sell or to give to members or supporters. We also offer archival pigment prints of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Costa Rica, East Africa, and Tuscany.
We also make globes. We offer a limited edition 19” hand-painted period globe showing the world as it was known to mid-seventeenth century Europeans. This globe was featured in the Spring 2006 issue of Men’s Vogue; recently, the New York Public Library acquired one for its collection. We can also make a custom globe in any size showing your travels or world-wide business locations.
Connie Brown
Duncan Milne