#5_”Family Snapshot”

Family Snapshot, 1999

Back in 1985, I was really into Peter Gabriel—especially his Plays Live album. I had it playing all the time while I drew.

One track, “Family Snapshot,” really stuck with me. It had this slow, quiet sadness that crept up on you—and it hit deeper than I expected. That’s when the drawing Family Snapshot started to take shape.

It took me a few days—and a lot of tears—to finish. I’d loop that same song while I worked, and for whatever reason, it pulled things out of me I didn’t even know were there.

The piece was done on regular 8.5 x 11" paper using Koh-I-Noor technical pens and colored pencils. There’ve been many times I’ve sat with it, thinking about adding color to a few blank areas or filling in little details. But in the end, I had to admit—it already says what it needs to say.

Family Snapshot is about the death of a marriage. Divorce is the tragic end of a life built together. Lives get torn apart, and a child’s emotional understanding of the world as they knew it is completely shattered.

Woven into the piece is also a quiet wish for the Old World—an ancient way of living more in tune with the rhythms of Mother Earth—and a quiet pushback against the modern world’s worship of technology and what I call the “Time Clock Family.”

While I was working on the piece, I started weaving in this poem:

Poem within the piece Family Snapshot:

Oh how I dreamed of a fantastically superb family
all draped and disguised in the waterfalls of wonder
where little boys and girls walk amongst the cheer
of swollen, rippled waters so anxious for the remedy
to soothe the drippings of chores
and the twisted things that parents would have us do…

(Sigh)

Can’t we just bathe in the delight of the evening shade
where moths pattern the glow of the street lamps
with their whimsical ways of doing?

Or are we all just simple questions
floating through the promised land of time
trying desperately to justify our misguided belief
that we might be…
Omniscient beings?

Peter Gabriel, Plays Live - Family Snapshot

https://music.apple.com/us/album/family-snapshot-live/1445903069?i=1445903073