1
ABOUT THE PIECE
The Ellerys arrived with a shoebox. Four generations of photographs, most of them creased, two of them the only picture that exists of the person in it. They wanted them together on one hallway wall, painted rather than reprinted.
We painted four oil portraits at matching scale — a great-grandmother in 1938, a grandfather at sea, a mother on her wedding day, and a five-year-old who is now taller than all of them. Everything was built to make the wall feel like one family rather than four separate pictures.
2
THE TRICKY PART
Two of the source photographs were barely usable. One was a passport shot the size of a stamp, the other had water damage across half the face.
We rebuilt the missing detail from siblings who are still living, sitting with them over three afternoons to get the line of a jaw and the set of the eyes right. Painting a face nobody can check against a photograph is the hardest thing we do. You are working from memory that belongs to somebody else, and you only know you have it when they go quiet looking at it.
3
HOW IT LANDED
The four portraits went up together last spring. Everybody who visits finds their own face in one of them first, then works backwards through the rest.
We delivered four framed oil portraits at matching scale, hung and lit, plus archival scans of the original photographs. Two of the Ellerys have since commissioned portraits for their own homes, and the shoebox has been retired to a drawer.
4
See More Work
