The Smith Family

Medium: Watercolor
Date: 2007

Portraiture Series, Part Two of Three

There is a kind of portrait that begins as a commission and slowly becomes a study of how people belong to one another.

This week's piece is "The Smith Family," the second entry in my three-part portraiture series — a brief departure from my usual surreal work, where I am turning toward real families, real faces, and the warmth that lives in the space between them. Where the first entry in this series asked what happens when a single face carries an invented gesture, this one asks what happens when four people are drawn so close their cheeks nearly touch.

This portrait was created from a special request by my friend Jack, whom many affectionately call "Uncle Scrooge." He wanted a portrait of the Smith family, a family incredibly dear to his heart, made to sit beside his grand old desk.

That detail mattered to me.

A desk is never just furniture. It is where letters are opened, decisions are made, memories are kept, and the ordinary weight of life gathers quietly over time. To make a portrait intended for that space felt different from making an image meant only for a wall. It needed to feel like it belonged among thought, history, affection, and legacy.

Before I began, Jack sent the family to a museum to study the old masters and choose images that spoke to them. I loved this. Instead of asking me to simply copy faces from photographs, he allowed the family to enter the portrait through their own attractions — through the paintings, eras, textures, and symbols that pulled at something inside them.

So this portrait became something more than likeness. It became four people, pressed close together, mid-laugh, unguarded — delighted, it seems, to be exactly where they are.

Beside the Grand Old Desk

At the center of the composition, the family gathers so close their cheeks nearly touch. The whole group is rendered in warm sepia ink and wash — a single tonal family of browns that holds everyone together before a single symbol is added. Gold leaf breaks that monochrome in exactly three places: the arc of the frame that holds them, the sword that grounds them, and the halo that crowns the daughter. Everywhere gold appears in this piece, something is being marked as significant.

Behind the mother and father, a mountain landscape rises — icy peaks and winding rivers, touched with the atmospheric mystery of the Mona Lisa. It is not the mother's world alone. It belongs to both of them, a single horizon built jointly, private in its depth but held in common. It is the kind of background that does not explain itself, the kind two people arrive at only after years of standing in the same place.

Inside that shared landscape, the father's hand rests gently on the mother's shoulder. That hand became one of the emotional centers of the painting. It does not announce itself. It does not compete with the sword or the halo. It simply stays — the quiet, specific gesture inside the larger world the two of them have made together.

Below the whole family, the son holds a gleaming sword, gold-leafed and bright against the sepia around it. It doesn't stand upright beside him the way a personal emblem might. It runs low and horizontal along the very bottom edge of the composition — less a symbol of individual adventure than a foundation the entire family is resting on.

Above them, apart from the shared landscape and the grounding sword, the daughter is crowned with her own heavy, gold-leafed, star-burst halo — the one symbol in the piece that belongs to no one but her.

The Different Shapes of Belonging

I expected, going in, that each figure would carry a separate, private world — the way symbols usually divide up in my surreal work, one apiece, four parallel emblems. What emerged instead was truer to how families actually work: two of these worlds turned out to be shared, one turned out to hold everyone up, and only one turned out to belong to a single person alone.

The mother and father's landscape is a joint horizon, not two people each retreating into private mystery. Their depth is mutual — built by two people who have spent enough time together that where one's world ends and the other's begins is no longer a meaningful question.

The son's sword, running along the base of the whole group, isn't really about him individually. Once it's placed, it reads less as gesture and more as ground — the family is standing on it together. Courage, here, doesn't set him apart so much as become something everyone gets to stand on.

The daughter's halo is the exception: the one purely individual symbol in a piece that turned out to be far more about togetherness than separateness. Her radiance belongs to no one else, and it doesn't ask to be shared.

None of this cancels the risk in each arrangement. A shared horizon can also mean two people lose track of where one ends and the other begins. Being the ground everyone stands on can mean going unnoticed, unthanked, mistaken for having nothing to say. Standing alone in your own light, even radiant, can be its own kind of solitude.

But in this piece, none of that tips into loss. The mother and father carry a horizon built together. The son carries the ground the whole family stands on. The daughter carries a light that is entirely her own. Three different arrangements of togetherness and separateness — none of them lesser for being different.

Room to Be Fully Seen

When I presented the finished piece to Jack, he said it felt like looking at the family through a window into their souls. I understood what he meant the moment I saw the reaction — not the polite nod people give a portrait, but the kind of laugh that comes from being caught exactly as you are.

That's the thing about painting people this close together, this happy: there's nowhere for a symbol to hide behind decoration. A shared horizon, a foundation, a solitary light — none of it is ornamental here. It's simply what was already true about how these four people held each other, made visible.

Auguste Rodin once said the artist generalizes — that from the particular, a masterpiece is made. I was painting one specific family, cheek to cheek, laughing at some joke I'll never be in on. But underneath that particular joke sits something larger: the need to be both known and accepted, both separate and held.

We often talk about family as though it's one thing — one name, one household, one frame. This portrait argues otherwise. Belonging takes different shapes depending on who's carrying it: a horizon two people build together over years, ground that holds everyone up without asking for credit, a light that gets to stay entirely someone's own even in the middle of all that closeness.

None of it has to be sacrificed for the rest. That's what love does at its best — it doesn't erase the individual, it makes room for the individual to be fully seen, even mid-laugh, even cheek to cheek with everyone else in the frame.

Are you part of a shared horizon, the ground someone else is standing on, or the one whose light stays entirely your own?

Join me in the comments and let us explore the contrasts together.