The picture of the perfect family.  What image comes to mind?  A husband, a wife, two kids, and a dog?  The idea of a family is universal. Yet the persistence of an ideal family as ‘a man, a woman, and two biological children’ is not only unrealistic to the changing demography of our country, it is also detrimental to the effort of many families that are dedicated in their love, commitment, and support of one another.  When the term ‘family values’ is uttered, it is primarily employed as a descriptive label for this traditional familial structure, and not anything to do with the internal supportive relationships that should exist within a model family.
     Resistance to the recognition of non-conventional families is based on a traditional system of family values, which fails to penetrate beyond the configuration of a family. Rather, it encompasses ideals of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other biases.   To abide by these beliefs means to hold the perception of image as the most important; and not the love, commitment, respect, and dependability on which a family is born.
     These paintings refer to historical painted family portraits, whose existence was to portray families of distinguishable social standing, The figures in these paintings were carefully adorned with the clothes and jewelry, and surrounded by the objects appropriate to their prestigious place in society.  They were portraits of idealism.
     Each contemporary family portrait is based on reality and depicts two generations of an existing family. The figures are painted directly on the canvas, in their own space, devoid of any kind of background and possible associations of place, mood, or social symbols.  This isolation serves to cancel extraneous information and concentrate on each individual figure, and then emphasize the image of the family as a whole.  There is no precise blueprint for which family members are portrayed, and viewers are left to formulate the relations within each painting themselves.  Each painting defies judgement, ideals, prejudices, and laws, by simply representing... a family.