New Family Paintings

For centuries, it was the fashionable thing to have oil paintings made to immortalize the faces of your family members. Wealthier families had numerous and large paintings made of their family, adults and children alike. Sometimes even the family pet was immortalized. The advent of photography forever changed the ways in which we create visual records of people. Modern people have hundreds of photos of themselves, their significant others, their children, and even more photos of their pets. Sitting for hours for a painter to record your face for posterity is a thing of the past. Now with the click of a button you can instantly have a perfect representation of your likeness. 

In my project, ‘New Family Paintings’ I strove to bring back the hands on quality of oil painting portraits and combine it with crisp accurate nature of photography. The photographs I took were solemn, stiff, and overall traditional poses, harkening back to the poses of 16th and 17th century oil paintings of the powerful and wealthy. I created a more painterly, organic effect in my photographs by carefully placing developer on my photographs via eyedropper, brush, or spray bottle. These ‘New Family Portraits’ are a painted portrait for the modern age.