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Alan Tudyk was looking for something special. The prolific actor, star of “Resident Alien” as well as the voice of manic chicken Heihei in “Moana,” wanted to commission a painting to honor three beloved rescue dogs, but his visions tended to the fantastical. One idea, a portrait of his 14-year-old “terrier/poodle/chihuahua/goddess” mix Raisin holding a box of matches in front of a burning school, was rejected by a British pet portraitist: “We were told by his assistant he doesn’t do paintings like that,” Tudyk said. So he reached out to Jennifer Gennari, a painter who has been doing animal portraits in oil for nearly a decade, and she “embraced it,” Tudyk said.

For Gennari, Tudyk cooked up an even more ambitious concept: all three dogs in a scene of epic Boschian carnage. Against an eerie background of the dogs’ favorite Vancouver, B.C., woods, Gennari posed Lola, a Maltese who had recently died at 16, atop a pile of moose carcasses (plus one dismembered human hand), blood smearing her dainty white jowls. Aunt Clara, the 12-year-old cockapoo, holds a limp boa constrictor in her jaws, and Raisin is locked down on a dead squirrel. Several coyotes are vanishing into the trees behind them, presumably fleeing in terror. “We just wanted something that showed [the dogs] victorious over our idea of their enemies,” Tudyk explained.

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As pet owners spend more money on their animals — a recent Bloomberg Intelligence report estimated that the $320 billion global pet industry will expand to $500 billion by 2030 — they increasingly turn to fine-art painters like Gennari, who can create a pet portrait worthy of a museum or, in Tudyk’s case, some unholy twisted hunting lodge. These paintings aren’t cheap: Tudyk’s, which measured about 26 by 32 inches, cost $7,200, plus framing costs. But for the people who love them, they’re worth every penny. Tudyk actually owns two paintings by Gennari, the other a smaller close-up memorial portrait of Lola that he takes with him between his two homes in Vancouver and Los Angeles. “It’s a way of … keeping her in our lives,” he said.

Gennari is an accidental pet portrait artist. After working as an illustrator and studying in Florence, she moved to New York and worked for Jeff Koons. In her off-hours, she painted — mostly humans — and sold her paintings in a Hamptons gallery. In 2015, she painted a hairless Sphynx cat, just for fun, and put it on Instagram. “People loved it,” she said. It sold immediately.

Now, almost 10 years into what’s become a major business, she gets around 20 commission requests a day, including from celebrities like Tudyk and art-world insiders. Her oil painting prices start at a few hundred dollars and can go up to $20,000 for a large portrait with multiple animals. She earns, she says, in the six figures.

“I’ve referred to her … as the greatest living animal portrait artist in the country,” says Nicholas Lowry, the president of Swann Auction Galleries and an “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser who owns a Gennari portrait of his Boston terrier, Tilda. Nikki Glaser, a comedian who owns a Gennari portrait of a pig and recently commissioned another of a friend’s elderly poodle mix, says, “She can just inject a personality and a soul into the animal that only the owner would really know.” Plus, she added, Gennari’s classic style “just looks old as f---.”

In fact, Gennari’s work does draw on a long artistic tradition. Pet portraiture has been around for millennia, back to cave paintings, ancient Chinese ceramic statues and mosaic images of guard dogs in Pompeii. In the European portrait painting tradition, pets could represent wealth and status or symbolize positive character traits in their owners. More recently, however, the genre’s reputation took a downturn. “It’s always been very respected until maybe the early 20th century,” Gennari said. “All of a sudden it became this thing where it was like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you only paint animals?’”

Part of this may be the recent democratization of options. Pet portraits are more accessible than ever, and there’s a wide spectrum of quality, putting fine-art painters like Gennari in the tiny minority. A search for “pet portraits” on Etsy brings up over 5,000 results, from basic watercolors to custom Photoshop images that allow you to pose your pet in the frills of a Victorian queen or the braided epaulets of a 19th-century naval officer, from $20-$150.

For deeper-pocketed pet owners, however, there are other options. Anthony Barham paints in what he calls a Victorianesque “chocolate box, traditional style,” and has painted pets belonging to the late Sen. John W. Warner and other elite Virginian animal lovers. Scott Lenhardt, a graphic artist who also designs snowboards, does elegant portraits in acrylic on oval-shaped pieces of wood. Erica Eriksdotter specializes in portraits of animals who have recently died. J. Penry, who started his career as an illustrator for Nylon and Vice, paints watercolors of pets wearing giant hoop earrings or in Siouxsie Sioux makeup.

Much of their business originates on Instagram. Most of the resulting portraits are based on photos, though Barham often works from videos, which he believes give a better sense of the animal’s personality. He was recently commissioned to paint two poodles around a dining room table, being served food and drink by squirrels in kilts; another owner requested a painting of their pet beaver lounging on a sofa eating strawberries.

Penry has painted parakeets in evening wear, rabbits in top hats, a poodle in 1940s glam, a one-eyed cat named Winky with a blue jay on their shoulder. “People do know the personality of the pet, they know exactly what they want to see,” he said, whether it’s their dog in Eugene Levy glasses or a cat posed like a Dirk Diggler-style ’70s porn star.

For other owners, a highly realistic portrayal of their animal can provide comfort and connection. Eriksdotter works closely with clients to create vivid memorial portraits. “I tap into the animals, and I feel them in the studio with me as they come alive on the canvas,” she said. “And I capture that in my portraits, so the clients can feel how their fur felt and the way their pets gazed up at them.” For her clients, she said, the creation of a memorial portrait “is more than a high-end pet portrait, it is an experience, a peaceful journey that leads to a healing place.” Lenhardt described a similar connection to the animals he paints: “People have asked, how do you know you’re done? My answer to that is usually, when the animal blinks.”

The artists and their clients view the portraits as having a unique and very special value that merits the high price tag. “There’s some people who like to go to Petco and buy the same jacket that everybody has,” said Nicholas Lowry, the auctioneer. But a fine-art portrait, like his Gennari painting, “is meaningful because it’s so personalized.”

For Alan Tudyk, the value is extremely personal. During walks with Lola, Aunt Clara and Raisin, he would envision that bloody scene in such detail that he is very clear on how, exactly, these tiny dogs would have subdued their much larger victims. For Lola and the moose, “I’m pretty sure it was just a leap into a jugular lock. You got to take out the biggest one first,” he said. Aunt Clara, with the boa, “thought it was fun and just shook [the giant snake] around like it was a toy,” while Raisin “killed the squirrel just to be part of it, [but] she didn’t want to exert herself too much.”

Gennari, in her efforts to render Tudyk’s concept faithfully, “had to look up all of these weird photos for reference that, my gosh, I was not thrilled to have on my laptop.” But she didn’t mind — in the end, she found Tudyk’s vision “sweet.”

“I think people experience a lot of complication,” she said, talking about her clients in general. “Love between two people is extremely complicated.” With animals, however, “the ease and honesty of that relationship generates a love that’s very pure.” Pet portraits, at their best, capture and preserve that pure love, becoming a “physical manifestation of how [the owner] feels about their animal.” As a lifelong animal lover herself, Gennari is also concerned for the pets’ experience. “All of this attention goes toward painting people,” she said. “I just didn’t want [animals] to feel forgotten about.”

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