Family Portraits
I felt that it was time to update Bart van der Leck’s abstraction ‘Family’ from 1917 with our progress on what it means to be a family today.
Bart van der Leck (1876 - 1958) was a Dutch painter who founded the De Stijl art movement together with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. He was a leading figure in the drive towards pure abstraction, by the reduction to the essentials of form and colour. He’s one of my favourite painters.
One of his topics of disagreement with Mondrian (other than if it was ok to use diagonal lines) was that Van der Leck felt that abstract paintings should be based on representational images, rather than just the pursuit of perfect abstract harmony.
A key example of his representational abstraction, and I believe one of his most important paintings, is “Family” from 1917, an abstract representation of a father, mother and a child, the family ideal at the time. I felt it was important to expand the abstraction in this painting with our progress made since then, to celebrate the progress and challenge the classic family stereotype.
An important area of progress is same-sex marriage. The first country to grant marriage equality to same-sex couples was the Netherlands on 1 April 2001, and as of today, same-sex marriage is legally performed and recognized in 29 countries.
I’m sad to say that Italy is not one of them. Also these countries represent just 16% of the world population, so one could argue that little progress has been made.
Another area of progress is the increase of divorce rates. ‘How can this be progress?’, you might be thinking.
Divorces are very sad and painful for all people involved, I’m not denying that, I know this firsthand. However, I still believe it’s progress because more people are able to and brave enough to choose to end a marriage, rather than being locked up in a marriage that stopped working for whatever reason.
Life is too short for that. As divorces become more commonplace, I do hope the social stigma associated with it will disappear. It is not helpful, and a divorce is hard enough already.
Divorce with children involved is even harder. While being married simply stops with a divorce, the responsibility of parenting continues.
Here is another area of progress since 1917, as more and more divorced parents decide to share custody and care, and become co-parents, instead of the traditional mother-sole-custody arrangements. It’s best, for everyone involved.
Finally, there has been great progress and development in the role of the father. Today’s father is no longer the traditional married breadwinner and disciplinarian in the family, leaving the parenting and housework to the mother. The modern father is a more than capable caregiver to his children, fully supporting and pushing for equality in the socio-economic role of mothers, at the same time setting a great example for his kids.
I wanted to represent these things in my paintings, to provide hopefully a refreshing look on modern day families, building on the abstraction pioneered by Bart van der Leck over 100 years ago.