Lil & Liza.

Lil & Liza.
Oil on Canvas, July 2022
92 x92x 4cm
NFS

Lil and Liza are sisters and related to my family. Although we live in separate cities, we visit them frequently. Last year, at a family dinner, I took a photo of them with the thought that the photo would make a good painting. 

At dinner that night, I was struck by the way both girls were somewhat disconnected from the general proceedings in a thoughtful, quiet, and distant, kind of way. Turns out that there was a whole lot of lifechanging drama going on for their family, which I was unaware of, at the time. Had I been aware of it, I wouldn’t have painted this portrait. 

Lil’s and Liza’s mother, (who I thought I would give the painting to), didn’t want or like this painting, as she felt it captured the emotional pain of her children in that moment. However youngest daughter, Liza, loved the painting as she felt that I, “made her hair look good and her arms look tanned”. So the family kept the painting after all. 

I also have a long running tendency towards occasionally drawing Japanese bowls, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity of including crockery in this painting.