I’m excited to reveal several of the Family Portrait series watercolor paintings that I’ve been working on for the past two months. I’ve finished 7 of the original 9 images I’ve drawn up, and there’s a decent chance I’ll add a few more before it’s completed.
The idea behind the Family Portrait series is to create artifacts that evoke a strong sense of nostalgia and personal memory for the viewer. I did this by selecting cast portraits of certain TV sitcom families to reproduce in watercolors and display in cheap thrift store frames, and hopefully these portraits will all be hung on a “Family Portrait Wall” with a loud, floral pattern wallpaper decor and possibly some old furniture and other cheap wall-hanging decorations alongside them. The criteria I used to select which TV families would be immortalized in the series was to select sitcoms that had that serious dramatic element embedded at the end. Shows like Family Matters, Who’s the Boss, and Growing Pains. These were all comedies that took the liberty to teach us, the audience, real life lessons among all the humor, and through the amount of time we spent observing these families we psychologically became a part of their family. If you think about it, you’ve probably spent hundreds of hours watching shows like this, and they form a strong but subtle connection to your psyche that teaches you how to interact with others in society.
The response to the new paintings has been overwhelmingly positive so far, as most people have very warm, positive feelings surrounding these fictitious families, which was exactly what I wanted to play off of in making them. The Tanner Family is completed and will join the clan soon once photographed, along with the centerpiece of the series, The Huxtables, and whatever other shows I deem appropriate to add to the series. I hope to figure out a venue and means of displaying them in their intended context on the Family Portrait Wall within the next year.
Of course any praise and adoration is welcomed, but if you also have any questions about the work, or any of my other pieces in general, write me at matt82kuhlman at gmail dot com. I’d love to hear from some of you beautiful people out there. Sometimes it gets so lonely being in the studio all day…
