Medium: Graphite
Date: 1998
Portraiture Series, Part Three of Three
There is a particular kind of portrait that asks the artist to draw two different years onto a single sheet of paper, and to make them feel like one moment.
This series began with a single face carrying an invented gesture, then widened to four people pressed close enough to share one landscape. This final piece asks the quietest question of the three: what does a family look like when it has to hold two different years of itself at once?
This week's piece began with a phone call from my neighbor. Her sister, a nurse who had come to this country from the Philippines, was in the middle of a battle with cancer. The treatments had taken her hair. In response, her husband shaved his own head — not out of necessity, but out of love, so that she would not face the mirror alone. Her brother wanted a memorial portrait made of the whole family, something that would outlast the hardest season of their lives and hold, in one frame, who they truly were.
That request came with a quiet complication I hadn't fully anticipated until the reference photos arrived.
Two Years, One Sheet of Paper
For herself and her husband, she chose photographs from two years earlier — before the diagnosis, before the treatments, when both of them still had a full head of hair. For their two children, ages seven and ten, she sent me recent photographs, taken just weeks before.
I was being asked, in effect, to draw two different points in time as though they had happened on the same afternoon.
I chose not to smooth that seam over. The parents are rendered as they were before illness entered the house — steady, unhurried, exactly as they remembered themselves. The children are rendered as they are now — a little taller, a little older than the version of the family the parents' photographs preserved. Nothing in the drawing announces this gap. It simply sits there, the way it sits inside every family that has lived through a crisis: the parents somewhere back before it started, the children still growing forward through the middle of it.
A Shared Baldness, A Shared Battle
The husband's choice to shave his head never made it into this particular drawing — the reference photograph predates it — but it shaped how I approached every line of his face. Solidarity like that isn't loud. It isn't a gesture made for an audience. It's a private agreement between two people that neither will carry the visible weight of illness alone, even when only one of them is sick.
I thought about that agreement while I worked. Graphite is a forgiving, patient medium — built from erasure as much as from mark-making — and it felt right for a story about two people quietly choosing to look more alike, not less, in the middle of hardship.
"The Artist Made Me Pretty"
When she saw the finished drawing, she said, "Oh, the artist made me pretty."
I want to be honest about what I did and didn't do. I didn't flatter her. I drew exactly what was in the photograph she chose — her own face, from a year she remembered clearly, before treatment had asked anything of her. What she was responding to wasn't invention. It was recognition. Cancer has a way of convincing a person that the body in the mirror is the only true version of them. The portrait simply handed her back a version she already knew was real.
That's the quiet power of working from a chosen photograph rather than a clinical one: the subject gets to decide which truth about herself gets preserved.
What the Frame Holds Together
Every family portrait I've made carries some version of this same tension — the individual and the collective, the past self and the present one, the private ache and the public face a family shows the world. This piece just made that tension unusually literal. Two adults drawn from before. Two children drawn from now. A husband's solidarity that shows up nowhere in the linework and everywhere in the feeling of it.
Rembrandt once said he sought not the eye's satisfaction, but truth in movement — the deeper resemblance beneath the surface likeness. I wasn't drawing four people as a camera would have caught them in a single instant. I was drawing what stayed true across two years that changed almost everything: a family that held together in the same shape, even as the surface of their lives changed around them.
That's the lesson this one left me with. A family portrait doesn't have to freeze one moment to tell the truth. Sometimes the more honest picture is the one that lets a little time move through it — the parents as they were, the children as they are, and the love between all four of them constant in both directions.
Looking back across all three portraits in this series, none of the families I drew stayed still long enough to be captured in a single, uncomplicated moment. A commission carrying the weight of a father no longer here. Four people close enough to share one horizon. A family split across two years and held steady anyway. Each one insisted that likeness was never really the point — truth was.
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