Medium: Graphite on smooth vellum
Date: 2002
Portraiture Series, Part One of Three
I am beginning something new this week — a three-part departure from my usual surreal work. Over the coming entries, I want to show you three portraits I have made of real families, real faces, real grief and real love, with none of the masks or animal symbolism I usually reach for. This is the first.
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that becomes, with enough time, can become the truest thing in the room. This week's piece is not a surreal invention in the way my usual work is — there are no masks here, no animals standing in for grief. It is a graphite portrait of a family, yet it may be the most dichotomous piece I have ever made, because what is most tender in it is something I made up.
My friend Tonia commissioned this portrait as a surprise for her husband Ray. She gave me a stack of photographs — each family member captured separately, alone in their own frame, the way most of our photographs actually are. No one was touching. No one was arranged the way a family arranges itself only in memory, or in hope. She made no suggestions for grouping.
I invented it.
The Symbolic Architecture of the Piece
At the center of the composition sits Jennifer, four years old and a brilliant child, who continually amazed us, luminous in the particular way that only children who don't yet know they are being looked at can be luminous. Around her, I closed distances the photographs had left open. I gave Ray his hand around Tonia's shoulder. And I gave Jennifer something that never existed in any photograph I was given: her small hand resting on her father's.
That gesture is fiction. It is also, I would argue, the realest part of the drawing.
There was one detail Tonia would not let me simplify — her hairdo, elaborate and exacting, the kind of hairdo that takes a graphite artist three times as long to render honestly. I offered to soften it. “No, don’t soften it,” she told me, "I love this hair, this way. Please do it as it is." I have thought about that sentence many times since. She was not asking me for an easier portrait. She was asking me to do the harder, truer thing — to draw hair she actually wore herself in that photograph, not as it was convenient for me to draw it.
Working in Graphite on Vellum
Graphite on smooth vellum is an unforgiving medium for tenderness. It does not blur softly the way charcoal does; it holds every line exactly where you put it, which means every invented hand, every closed gap between bodies, had to be drawn with the same physical certainty as the parts that were real. There could be no visual seam between what I observed and what I imagined. The medium itself refuses to tell you which is which. I finished the piece with a hand-drawn mat — a frame made by the same hand that made the drawing inside it, so that even the boundary of the work carries the same handwriting as its real and invented center.
The Emotional Weight This Piece Carries Today
Tonia paid me thirty percent more than I asked. In all my years of doing this work, she has remained the only client who has ever done that. At the time, I understood it as gratitude for a portrait well made.
I can understand it differently now.
Ray died of COVID in the spring of 2020. Eighteen years earlier I had drawn a hand he never actually placed with his daughter's, I did not know, when I was inventing closeness out of separate photographs, that I was taking an artistic liberty, making a small act of mercy the family could eventually need.
A Closing Reflection
We tend to think of invention as the opposite of truth — that to make something up is to move away from what is real. I no longer believe that is true. Sometimes invention is simply truth that hasn't happened yet, or truths that the camera was never in the room to catch. The closeness I drew between Ray and Jennifer was not a lie about their family. It was a more accurate portrait of how much they loved each other, more than any single photograph could have been, because love is not a moment a camera catches — It is the moments in between the moments, the hand you would have placed there if someone had only thought of doing it in that instant
Edgar Degas once said that art is not what you see, but what you make others see. I have always loved that line for its confidence. I love it differently now — because what I made others see, in this case, turned out to be something the family would need to see for the rest of their lives. A father's hand. A daughter's hand. Closed, finally, in graphite, amidst all the separate photographs that did not have this.
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