And then tell me all about how you made the time machine
which whisked you back to nineteen-thirty-five.
Norman Rockwell may have enjoyed this kind of family feast
but it’s been a long, long time since Norman put brush to canvas and there have
been one or two turns of the earth since then and let’s face it that sort of
thing is just gone.
The whole family is more than likely scattered to the four
winds. If the Great Recession didn’t rob them of their job and force them to
migrate to somewhere like South Dakota where they can find a job and pay for
the heating to stay alive in a South Dakota winter they went away to college
and never came back or they married and the bread-winner was forced to move to
South Dakota to find a job or they were getting on in years and they moved on
along the great earth cycle and are no longer gathering anything but moss and
there is just no one left to gather except you and that thing on the sofa with
the remote in its hand and that is why there will be no huge family gathering
this Thanksgiving.
And in truth those family gatherings where everyone came from
far and wide were fraught with anxiety. If the meal wasn’t perfect the Long
Sufferin went into a deep depression and didn’t come out until after Groundhog
Day or Uncle Zachariah started a fight about whether the current NFL teams were
as good as the Packers of old or the Bruins of old or the women on television
were wearing less than any descent woman should be allowed out of the house in
and the law school daughter allowed as how some people who get old should just
go ahead and die and make room for the generation which is going to fix all of
the damage they did and the environmentalist son-in-law is sure that eating
turkey’s will cause the destruction of all feathered creatures and probably
bring about the end of bee colonies and increase global warming and the
grandmothers are dueling it out over the correct and proper way to make
dressing and should it be in the bird or out and then there are the kids…
Maybe eating out alone in another city is the best plan.
But as an artist there is one thing that you should keep
foremost in your mind; however it goes, no matter how many show up, each time
Thanksgiving rolls around you have an opportunity to record the faces of a
family which may never be together again.
Sure we've all seen the families on television and wish that
ours could be so perfect but the fact is that when families get together they
don’t always get together peacefully.
If the writers of television shows are any barometer, all of
the Gen Xers are foaming at the mouth with bitter resentment of the reckless
way in which they were raised and the parents of those same Xers are wondering
how these children managed to grow up in a civilized home and have so little
respect for manners?
Lord, send me a picture!
And that is exactly what you should do.
Let’s just suppose that you do have a perfect television
family and that they gather in good cheer and never turn on the ballgame. Will
all of them be there next year?
Sure you could and should take a picture. Pictures make
wonderful reference material when you sit down to do a portrait. But they don’t always have the life the
people in those pictures overflow with and it is hard unless you are a
professional portrait photographer with hundreds of dollars in lighting and
thousands of dollars in camera equipment to capture the life in every single
one of them. (This assumes you can get them to stand still and let you take the
picture.)
Why not make this the year you get great reference pictures
of all of the family which gathers and spend the next twelve months making them
into magic with your brush/chisel/chalk or even crayon.
You know that you can in your own studio do a better job
than any mall side two for twenty-five dollar photo booth. Make beautiful,
thoughtful images of your beloved guys while they are still here to make those
images with.
And if you do then you have next holiday season knocked. You
can take those images and use your own masterful tactical family insight and
distribute them to the family which will most enjoy and appreciate them. (The
trick here is that the ones who get the portraits will laud it over the ones who
don’t and make their lives so miserable that they will come begging more and
you can supply them as well and stay busy all of the year just supplying the
family with irreplaceable views.)
I come from a family which was older when I came along, my
maternal grandfather had been dead for seventeen years, my maternal uncle nine,
my paternal grandfather and grandmother were alive and doing remarkably well
but there were no images of them as young people cause in those days film was
hard to come by and working people didn’t take pictures, except at weddings and
funerals. Fortunately my father was a brilliant, gifted pencil artist who
captured both Daddy Mix and Brother in pencil and colored pen, so I not only
know what they looked like but I know that Daddy Mix had those pale, almost
transparent blue eyes that look so weird and that he could turn a kid’s blood
to jelly with just a look and that Brother was a gut-busting, mother-loving
Navy man, (Sorry Otto I know what the censors wouldn’t let you say and it think
they were wrong but this is a PG sort of blog so I’ll just steal the line the
way you reluctantly re-wrote it for the screen), who had his father’s eyes but didn’t
use them like lasers, and I know this because of what my own father did.
So instead of complaining about Kmart opening on
Thanksgiving Day or about forty-seven football games all being played and
telecast at the same time or about how long you have to spend in the kitchen,
why not capture those family faces in your art so that no matter how far away
the clan gets there will always be those wonderful, treasured, loved faces
around your house.
I hope to God I did right when it was my turn to save the family faces Dad.
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