Of all the illustration projects that came my way, in those ten years, from 1983 to 1993, the one that most involved you as my model for reference photos was the little book for McGraw Hill, Jesus, Teach Us To Pray, intended as a gift for Roman-Catholic children between seven and fifteen, on the occasion of their first communion.

My most vivid memory of the project when it was sent to me, was that it was lovely, full of Bible stories and prayers — and that I was having a horrible allergic reaction to it.

I apologize for my prejudices. But there is an observable human reaction to certain interfaith encounters: it’s easier for me to dialogue with someone from a distant tradition, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Sufi Muslim, an atheist Trotskyite communist, than with someone from a very close tradition, aptly named by Freud as the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. My childhood church was liberal Protestant, where we were taught to pray to our heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name; we memorized The Lord’s Prayer. This little Catholic gift book’s text had moments for praying to Mary, to Saint Patrick, because Jesus is busy. Could I do this?

I called my dear friend, Mike Ginese, an Italian-American from upstate New York.

“Michael! I have this possible project. But I’m stuck. What was it like for you, growing up in the Catholic Church?”

Mike says, “From my earliest memories, I knew that I loved Jesus. All the other hocus pocus about Mary and the saints just confused me, and it wasn’t until I was a young adult, with broken relationships and a drug addiction problem, that I hit rock bottom, and remembered that Jesus loves me, unconditionally. But that seed was sown in my childhood, in my family, and that I knew I loved Jesus. So this is what I think. I think you should get over your White-Anglo-Saxo- Protestant allergies and help the kids who get this book to love Jesus, to know the love of God in Jesus.”
That conversation really happened.

Okay. So I took on this big, sprawling project with many little paintings, not the Sistine Chapel, just a little picture-book, but I went to work on it with as much creativity, craftsmanship, and efficiency as I could muster: reading the texts, making thumbnail rough-draft drawings, getting models and making reference photos. Then tracing the photos, in ‘production mode,’ and doing each frame as a little watercolor and gouache painting, with touches of pastel pencil, and with final, clear outlines with a mechanical pencil.

There they all are, and many more. It was a good run!

I love our three daughters, equally and uniqually, and my photos and drawings have quite accidentally become a sedimentary record of your infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, teen-years, and adulthood, playing make-believe for my crazy career.

What memories do you still have of helping me, posing for all of those scenes with Tony Bauman, Greg and Jill, the priest at the Catholic church in Hershey?

From under the lengthening shadows of Memory Lane,

love & hugs,

Yo’ Daddy

Thank you for those rich insights.

I feel like we have just driven up a steep mountain in low gear, and as we coast down the other side, we return to the stories behind the pictures.

Sometimes things really happened, but no photos were made to record them. Later, to encourage and equip others, words are written to tell the stories…

Familiar Faces: Dawn & Ernie

Competing with hundreds of other freelance illustrators, I had positioned myself as an Edward Degas pastel realist, aiming for story-telling figure drawings that were ‘loose-but-accurate.’

After sending a CV and a sample of my pastel drawings to one-hundred different publishers, I received a phone call from an art director at Nursing Magazine in Ambler, PA, inviting me to come in for a portfolio interview. The meeting went well; they liked my pastel portraits. The very first assignment was to do a full page, color illustration as the ‘hook’ for an article on nursing techniques for comforting a patient dying from lung cancer, terrified by their difficulty in catching their breath. I learned a new word for shortness of breath: dyspnea.

I read the text, did thumbnail sketches of scenarios. My thoughts went to our tall, thin, elderly, chain-smoking neighbor across the street, Ernie Young; then to Miriam’s friend, Dawn Davidheiser, trading babysitting and always present for meeting the kids at the school bus. Then we needed a setting, a convincing location. Good Samaritan Hospital in nearby Lebanon, PA.

People help people who need help. Ernie & Dawn agreed to pose for reference photos, and the PR people at Good Sam agreed to let us use an empty patient room, gowns, and even an oxygen tube.

This project was my first full exercise in using a slide projector to trace an image. I was shocked when I turned off the projector and turned on the light on my drawing board. All of the details of likeness and composition were traced onto the paper, but the distant ingredients leapt forward, and the closest objects receded! I had to do an extreme adjustment in ‘atmospheric perspective,’ as in a landscape, to get the image to tell its story convincingly. The close edge of the patient tray had to have the most contrast, darkest darks and the brightest whites; the figures of the patient and the nurse had to be softer, middle tones; the curtains in the background became very pale. And it worked.

Before I shipped the finished drawing to the art director, I showed it to our neighbor, veteran graphic designer and painter, Reed Dixon. Reed said, “Your pastels are becoming more rounded and three-dimensional. And you have an instinct for drawing people’s faces. I can do a thousand things, but I have never been able to draw faces.”

That was my first published magazine story. And my favorite part of the process was capturing the way the light fell on Ernie’s features and on Dawn’s hands.

Happy Eyes

In the 1980s, I was getting one or two projects per week. Our old-school, bookkeeping ledger shows that I did, on average, around seventy projects each year. Across ten years, that was roughly seven hundred projects. With most of those drawings, the client never sent me a finished sample. It was just survival, ‘work for hire.’ But the art directors at Springhouse Corporation and their Nursing Magazine and nursing textbooks showed more respect, and always sent me the printed results.

One of my little favorites was an opening-page, gray-tone drawing for Nursing Magazine, around 1989. The art director sent me an article, a true story by a head nurse on a hospital ward. Her staff was struggling to calm and comfort an elderly patient with a double diagnosis of bladder cancer and advanced dementia.

The difficulty was that this dear old lady, Ethel, was perpetually confused, frightened, angry, combative, trusting no one. Every attempt to give her explanations, comfort, and to administer medicines was met with screaming, growling, kicking, punching, scratching, biting, and trying to escape. The nursing staff finally kept her tied to her wheelchair, took out her dentures, and put thick socks on her hands. Nothing but a strong sedative would calm her.

Nothing, that is, until one day the charge nurse’s ten-year-old daughter, Sharon, stopped by the ward after a school and accidentally met the patient—who lit up at the sight of a child, waved at the girl to come over and visit with her, and trusted her. Ethel calmed down and conversed with great focus and delight. She spoke only incoherent gibberish, but the little girl playfully spoke ‘Pig-Latin’ back to her. They both giggled and continued, with an intonation that spoke of friendship and safety, weaving a fabric of trust.

Then Sharon signaled to her mother, the nurse, and introduced her to Ethel, and they all laughed together, and Ethel learned to trust the mom. The magic of friendship! After that, the daughter made regular visits.

Nice assignment! And a plan of action quickly came together. My own dear, tiny, seventy-year-old Momma Mary Jane was living nearby in the staff apartments at Philhaven Hospital; you were ten. You both agreed to pose for a set of reference photos at the hospital. Again, we borrowed a wheelchair and a patient gown, put socks on Mom’s hands. She popped out her dentures, delighted to show off her laughing, wrinkled lips. And you laughed with her, in Pig-Latin. Click goes the camera. The rest is history (again with a small ‘h’.

Ach! When it came time to do the final drawing, my soul was surprised to be drawing a portrait of my own mother, whose face was once the first face I learned to read, now aged, but still herself, AND to be drawing a portrait of you, my own beloved daughter, who has inherited my Momma Mary Jane’s happy eyes.

Sometimes we don’t know what an experience means until we look back on it. It was Soren Kierkegaard who said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Beyond Words

I got another call from the art director at Nursing Magazine, asking me for a pastel illustration, a page and a half, for a story, Shalom, Melissa, about a lady with advanced, terminal leukemia, weak, thin, losing her hair as a side-effect of chemotherapy. A nurse coming onto the evening shift reviews the charts, realizes that she knows this person from their synagogue, sets aside her professional distance, goes to her room, embraces her, and they weep together.

I thought of our dear Hutterite friend, Eileen Goodwin, healthy but thin, gaunt, great cheekbones, and, for the nurse, Ginger Goudy, wife of the pastor of the Methodist Church in Gretna, and they both agreed to pose.

And it was the same drill: meet at Lebanon’s Good Sam hospital, get the use of an empty patient room, a bed, a gown, an oxygen tube. I even brought along a bouquet of flowers for the windowsill. Within a week, I had the pastel painting completed and shipped.

A week later, I received ‘another-nuther’ call from the art director, saying that they liked the image so much that they wanted to use it for that month’s front-cover illustration as well, but they needed me to add more space to the top of the picture so that it could serve as a background for the cover’s ‘masthead’ name, Nursing88. They sent it back, I added the background texture in pastel, and shipped it off again. I got paid twice for the same project, which helped pay for orthodontic braces for your teeth.

With the earlier pastel of Dawn and Ernie, and with this cover illustration and the larger picture for the inside article, I accidentally became ‘that illustrator-guy who draws pictures of human compassion,’ and more assignments like that came my way. A struggling artist could have worse problems.

How does this memory help me to understand life backwards?

I realized that I was seeing one of my dreams come true: to make images in pastel, images that capture something of the way the light falls on the human face and the human figure. Another dream was also being realized: portraying the core value of caring for others, what Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier called “the meaning of persons.”

Looking at the road ahead with glances in the rear-view mirror,

love, Yo’ Daddy

Guess what: I actually still have the little tweed jacket from those pictures. It’s still in good shape, quietly waiting in a closet as a prop from our family myth. It’s bit big for Ayli right now, but I think it’ll be perfect this fall.

Reading your letter, I felt that familiar mix of wry tenderness I get when you tell a story and the whole room becomes a little brighter. Your “coat-rack” of True Stories, Bible Stories, and Lie Stories is such a you-invention: playful, but also secretly a whole philosophy. It made me think about what we hang on stories, and what stories hang on us.

I also keep thinking about those photos you described — the upside-down Alice, the jealous rabbit (me), the lamp on the floor, the cockroach-infested Lynnwood Gardens apartment, the whole little theater of necessity and imagination. When I was a child, I experienced the innocence of those images and the joy of posing and being part of the family image factory. I wasn’t bothered by the lack of consent then, because I didn’t yet have the concept, or the dread, of what an image can become once it leaves the narrative nest. Even more than the stories we tell, images are slippery.

Later, becoming aware of how so many pictures objectify and dehumanize children, I started to understand just how precarious images are. Even with no ill intent, a photograph can be misused if it’s taken out of context: copied, circulated, reframed, or simply falling into the wrong hands. I find myself cringing now at the thought of raising my daughter in a world where her image is so vulnerable. That’s why I never post pictures of her online. These days it feels almost miraculous to imagine making it to adulthood without your face scattered all over social media—innocence lost, pixel by pixel.

Your Goth classmate muttering “this could be interpreted as child abuse” landed differently for me, reading it now. Not because I think that’s what you were doing—I know you weren’t—but because interpretation has become a kind of gravity. Images don’t stay put. They travel. They get interpreted by strangers who weren’t there, who don’t know your hands, your gentleness, your intention.

The world is full of people who look without seeing, and now we’ve built machines that look without seeing at all, and search engines that allow people to gaze and fantasize without anyone looking back.

*

In March 1988, when I went with you to New York City to deliver one of your rush-job illustrations to a publisher, I saw a photograph of a dead body for the first time. It was the day after the chemical weapon attacks on Halabja, on the border between Iraq and Iran. A Kurdish man lying face down with his lifeless baby on the sidewalk. I remember it stopping me in my tracks — like my inner world hit a wall and didn’t know how to go around it. The only death I had known was our cat Sammy, who had been hit by a truck. For Sammy, we sang songs and wrote poems at his frozen grave. But how to relate to this quiet photo of a dead baby on the front page of a newspaper?

Years later, with Susan Sontag, I’m still deeply troubled by how little we are moved by images of suffering. How quickly horror becomes background noise. How we seem to have an appetite for genocide, a growing tolerance for the incommensurable. A lot of my research has circled around the “afterlife” of images: how they can say more than a thousand words and still be endlessly reinterpreted; how they can be proof and propaganda at the same time; how they can invite compassion or train us into numbness.

And now, in the age of AI, images are no longer umbilically linked to light in the world. They’re calculated, conjured, by algorithms feeding on archives. That changes the stakes again. It’s not just that an image can be taken out of context; it’s that context itself can be manufactured, endlessly, convincingly, at scale. The old assumption—that if we could only show the truth, people would wake up—feels almost naïve now. It was once thought that photography would cultivate empathy, that it would show the gruesome reality of war and make people care. So often it has had the opposite effect. We scroll past the dead. We argue over whether the dead are real. We turn away, or worse, cheer.

How do we navigate this numbness? The vacuum of presence and compassion, the way suffering gets flattened into content. The callous responses to the dying, to the displaced, the speed with which we move on. I see it in myself sometimes, and it scares me. May we remain devoted to awakening from this stupor of suffering.

Your way of drawing was never to shock people into caring. You didn’t try to bludgeon hearts open with cruelty. You invited people to kindness. You tried to humanize, to help people notice the way the light falls.

That feels like the real inheritance here—not only the tweed jacket, not even the rabbit photo, but the ethic underneath: the insistence that imagination can be gentle, that art can be a portal rather than a weapon, that stories can soften us back into feeling, can open rather than close the heart. It’s not a Disney world that ignores suffering or offers only happy endings, nor one that plays victim or innocent. It is more complex: to be implicated in what we see, to recognize others in ourselves and ourselves in others. To be entangled in all our differences, without separability.

When you say, “Yes, you can be the rabbit!” I hear something bigger than a cute childhood memory. I hear an invitation to belong, to play with stories and roles—to be seen with affection without being pinned down. Opening up a world of imagination to flex our narrative muscles.

Maybe that’s the question I’m still living inside: what stories can we tell now? What images, what rituals, what practices invite compassion rather than numbness? What opens hearts instead of hardening them? What returns us to presence?

I love you, Daddy. Thank you for the stories. Thank you for the tenderness behind the jokes. Thank you for making a world inside a little apartment where light could fall from above and turn into a rabbit-hole and a poster and a memory. One that I’m still holding, carefully, as I try to protect Ayli’s face and keep her innocence intact as long as we can.

Love & tweed-coat-hugs,
Shailoh

These stories of your childhood memories, of remembering your Momma Miriam praying a blessing over you, your life, your curls; of remembering the bedtime stories that I would sometimes concoct, instead of reading from a book; of remembering the various True Stories, Bible Stories, and Lie Stories—all of this reorients my illustration practice as a liminal space between these categories.

In the opening page of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas describes sticking his hand into a snowdrift and pulling out: the story of Mrs. Prothero and the fire!

So I reach into the carrier bag of my not-so-heroic career as an illustrator, and pull out: Alice in Wonderland and the Tweed Jacket.

Do you remember posing as the rabbit? This project was an example of one of our earliest and quirkiest reference photos, and of the final illustration that resulted from these photos.

In November of 1982, in my final class in Illustration, with Polish master-illustrator professor Stanislav Zagorski, all of us students had an assignment: to design and produce an illustrated poster for a theatre performance — a musical or a play — and I had an idea to make something for a dramatic adaptation of the Lewis Carroll book, Alice in Wonderland. In my thumbnail sketches, I found myself focusing on Alice and the Rabbit falling down the rabbit hole.

Back at our cockroach-infested little apartment in Lynnwood Gardens, I got the idea of gathering images of the light falling from above onto Alice in mid-fall, having the lamp on the floor, as light-source, and having Momma Miriam take photos while I held 5-year-old Joy upside-down over the lamp, her hair streaming, as it is inclined to do when one goes for a long fall down a deep, deep rabbithole.

And you, our 2-year-old Ruthie (aka Shailoh), complained, maybe out of jealousy.

“Take my picture, too!”

“Okay! You can be the rabbit! Let’s put this old tweed jacket on you, and have you hold this old pocket-watch.”

There they are in the reference photos, our beloved first-born and second-born daughters, engaged in illegal, unpaid child labor, posing for reference photos.

The next day, when I took the roll of film to the darkroom at the art school’s photo lab, developed it, and was making a black and white print, watching the image of upside-down Joy emerge in the chemical bath, one of the other students, a Goth dressed all in black, covered in piercings and tattoos, looked over my shoulder and muttered,

“You’d better be careful, man. This could be interpreted as child abuse.”
“No, brother, I’m just making reference photos of my daughters for a poster of Alice falling down the rabbit hole.”
“Just sayin’…”

Using the photos, working out the composition, painting the final watercolor version with the falling players’ cards—this process was my final dress rehearsal for a set of steps I would repeatedly use for the next 10 years. And although I have shown the Alice in Wonderland painting in my illustrator’s portfolio many times, I have never before shown these crazy home-made photos outside of our family.

Yes, you can be the rabbit!

Love & hugs & tweed-coat-rugs,

Yo’Daddy

It’s funny — little Aylinn says exactly the same phrase now when she wants to be held: “Hold you, hold you,” which of course is short for
“Do you want me to hold you?”
Every time she does it, I’m suddenly back in your arms as the safest place in the world.

Honestly, I didn’t mind modeling for your art practice at all. It felt special to be part of it, and the pictures really are priceless. It was a privilege and a formative experience to grow up inside what felt like a construction site of images. Especially because, unlike most of the kids around us, you raised us without television. Instead, we read books, played outdoors, and went to museums. I led a relatively sheltered life in Mt. Gretna: homeschooled, in our Mennonite community.

I remember how every time we went somewhere, Mom would smooth my frizzy braids, cup my freckled face in her hands, close her eyes, and pray over me before sending me out:

“May the LORD bless you and keep you.
May the LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
The LORD lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace…”

I usually kept my eyes open during these blessings, staring at the smiling lines around her eyes. I was never quite sure what a “countenance” was, but it sounded very serious and shiny.

I just hoped she wouldn’t do the full version in public. If we were in a hurry or there were obvious spectators, she’d give me the abridged version:

“Shine your light.”

Then I’d go out into the world with a little more bounce in my step, half-jokingly wondering if people would squint when they saw me or need sunglasses in my presence.

Stories of Invisible Worlds

You both infused our childhood with faith in an unseen world — a spiritual realm more real than the sticks and stones and bones of everyday life. You told us stories of a kingdom come, of an invisible world, of angels, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, heaven and hell. Stories of God, of war, of life and death. Tall tales, short stacks, poems, fantasy. Stories were the air I grew up breathing.

If we were lucky, we got bedtime stories in three flavors:

1. True stories from your childhood, family history, or historical events;

2. Bible stories—presented as true, but also accepted as stories, and;

3. ‘Lie stories’, which were completely made up.

I liked the first and the last kind best. You were never the hero of your own stories; you were usually the fool. The ‘true’ stories were often just as incredible as the lies.

Around the same time, I was reading The Lord of the Rings and the Bible in tandem. Stories of good and evil, allegories, parables. My mind was so saturated with stories that, for a while, I became almost immune to believing any of them.

One of the dynamics in writing this series with you is my attempt to reclaim the ability to see through stories, not just get swept up in them. It’s also an ode to the imagination, to the magical, invisible worlds I was raised in.

How we learn to see

Sometimes it seems that the work of image-makers is to make invisible things visible. In this project, I think we’re trying to take it a step further: to learn how we ‘see’ things in the first place. To understand how images are made, how we’ve been shaped by the world, and how we, in turn, become shapers of the world.

You asked a hard question about my purpose — why I do what I do?

Here’s my best attempt at an answer, but allow me to briefly come out of our little rabbit hole into a broader field with perspectives that come from my work as an artist, activist and educator.

My life is dedicated to collective transformation, to cultivating the ability to perceive the invisible structures that shape our lives and to find ways to respond to them with care and imagination.

I’ve come to realize that the torrent of images we see can start to form a kind of shield or echo chamber. Everything we’ve already seen piles up in front of our eyes and begins to obscure any fresh encounter with the world. Many of the structures that shape our perception are themselves invisible: power, familiarity, trauma, distorted self-images.

As Ariella Azoulay points out, the invention of photography is deeply entangled with an imperial way of seeing. With one click, photography can turn people into objects, and objects into commodities. That kind of gaze can easily disconnect us from actually being in the world. It takes practice to remind ourselves that our environment is not just there to be seen and captured; there is always someone, or something, looking back.

Photos can unknowingly embody and perpetuate a superficial colonial gaze — reproducing hierarchies, stripping images from their context, and prioritizing visuality over other ways of sensing. The work I do now is a long, slow engagement with these problems: an attention to dialogue and to who gets excluded, to unconscious bias, to embodied connections, to visual literacy.

If we treat photography not only as a way to produce images to contemplate from a distance, but as a relationship, an event, an invitation to be present with all our senses, then something opens up. There’s a passage toward more emancipatory, transformative practices that can actually engage with the burning questions of our time.

An image doesn’t tell us how to see the world. But by seeing through someone else’s gaze for a moment, we can learn to see differently.

Ursula Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”—the theory that early mankind’s most useful tool was not a weapon but a carrier-bag for hunter-gatherers—has been a big influence here: it nudges me away from heroic arcs and toward stories that hold and carry, rather than conquer. Culturally, we tend to imagine stories as heroic, apocalyptic, escapist, sometimes with the fantasy of just starting over on another planet. I’m more interested in what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”—finding the sequels, the quieter continuations, the stories that prepare us for soft, uneventful, cycles. The end is never really a full stop; it’s always a transmutation into something else. Likewise, even images are not stopping points, but are living within ever-changing stories and contexts.

Going back to where we come from: even in the beauty of our quiet life in Mount Gretna, swimming and skating at Lake Conewago, I also started to find traces of the genocide of the indigenous people who lived on the land for thousands of years. The lake down the road at Cornwall, which was once a mountain, and then the largest open pit iron mine in America. It’s this eerily beautiful, toxic site, a monument to the long shadow of settler colonialism, the weapons industry, industrial capitalism until the open-pit Cornwall Mine flooded fifty years ago. Rusted ruins, contaminated water — a landscape that’s both a graveyard for an exhausted resource and a warning. I keep circling around the questions:

How do we learn to live with what’s been left behind?

What gestures of care are even possible there?

I guess, in the end, I’m still that kid sitting on your lap, learning that shadows are shimmering with all sorts of colors. Only now the “shadows” are also histories, systems, stories, and endings. And I’m still trying to learn how to see them—and how to help others see them too.
How can we stay with the trouble, stay sensitive and receptive to suffering, both visible and invisible?

With love, curiosity, and a whole lot of inherited wonder,

your daughter,
shailoh

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Here we go, digging around in the files of our diminishing memories!

When I come across this photo of us — you sitting on my lap at my drawing-board work station — I remember you as two-year-old Ruthie, and the painting I later did for a course on watercolor, using that photo as reference… and another flood of memories comes bubbling up, like vegetables in a simmering pot of soup.

It must have been in November 1981. The stressful mix of full-time art school courses and weekend odd jobs for survival was ameliorated by our parallel life as a little family: my Miriam and me with you and Joy, our toddler daughters, five and two, growing, developing, blossoming.

One winter evening, I was delighted to be doing homework at my drawing board, a watercolor for a fictitious movie poster of Laurel & Hardy, when you teetered into the room, asking, “HOLD YOU? HOLD YOU?”

I took a break, lifted you to my lap, and supplied you with a pencil and paper. You started drawing.

Your Mama peeked in on us.
“Are you guys alright?”
“We’re better than alright; we’re cave-artists, collaborating. Would you grab the camera and take a picture? I have an assignment to do a watercolor of everyday life at home.”
“Suuure.”

The rest is history, with a small h. But I’m glad we captured that moment.

I find myself surprised and delighted by the back story that triggered this conversation: you asking your Master of Photography students to compile an archive of their first memories of compelling images. And your flood of early childhood memories of posing for reference photos for me, when I was a student.

A Good Reason to be in Art School

1982, still at Tyler. Our life drawing teacher, Roger Anliker, suddenly shouted:
“Stop, stop! You’re all doing crap drawings! Come sit in a circle. Why are you in art school? What is your one goal?”

Simon said, “Album design and rock concert production.”

Anliker said, “That’s two things. Pick one.”

“Album design.”

And when their faces turned to me, all that I could say was,

“I want to capture the way the light falls on the human face, the human figure, like Degas; not for rich collectors, but for book illustrations, in the hands of thousands of everyday people.”

And Anliker said,
“Now that’s a good reason to be here.”

And after graduating, I got to do that for ten years, for which I am deeply grateful.

So, dear Shailoh: what other memories can you dig up from that season, living at Lynnwood Gardens Apartments, playing with your sister, Joy, making necklaces out of paper clips?
And perhaps, to put you on the spot like my teacher did:

“Why do you do what you do? What is your one goal?”

Infrared Zombie Children

A wrinkle in time: I was taking a Tyler course in black & white photography, experimenting with infrared film and a red filter on the lens, shooting trees and skies, inspired by art history and the work of photographer Minor White.

I had one last shot left in a roll of film when I came home to our apartment. You and Joy were in your bedroom, backlit by sunset light pouring through the window.

Wow! That would make a great picture!

As I swung my camera viewfinder to my eye, you both growled in unison,
“We don’t want you to take our picture.”
Click.

Angry zombie children.

In the infrared film, your light green eyes collapse into black holes; your backlit hair has a halo.

I feel that apologies are fitting, to both you and to your sister, after all these years. This was not the most flattering childhood photo. Everyday life gets offered up on the selfish altar of art experiments. But I have to admit, I do also like having a record of our beautiful daughters as grim zombies!

Reading on the Porch

Speak, O Memory, of living on a shoestring, of finishing art school in Philadelphia, of moving back to Mount Gretna, of setting up my practice as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer.

I had NO CLIENTS, and I stepped outside one morning in May, and discovered you sitting in the rocking chair on our front porch, reading a book.

I asked, “Can I make a drawing of you reading?” Okay.

And for several days, I worked on a pastel drawing of you, drawing from life, with an ambitious stack of big children’s books beside you. We worked together on this for several days, until your patience and stamina as a model had been drained dry. Then I took a photo of you and the setting to finish the project.

Then, back in those days before digital cameras, the internet, and smartphones, I took my roll of 35mm film to a photo-booth outlet and had 100 copies of that pastel drawing printed, and enclosed them with a cover letter, a business card, and my CV, and sent them to 100 publishing houses, researched from bookstores, and from a book called The Artist’s Market. About twenty of those one-hundred began to call me with quite varied assignments. I started building momentum and was able to earn a living.

Apples for the Teacher

There was a constant time-pressure in trying to support our family on my uneven income as a freelance illustrator. About five years into doing pastel assignments, I found myself missing making drawings from life. Nearly all of my projects involved people, and to respect their time, I would take photos, transfer the outlines and proportions onto larger paper, and work for hours. But there were nuances missing.

So when the request came for a drawing of “apples for the teacher,” I had an epiphany: I didn’t have to draw them from photos. Apples can pose patiently.

So, my dear daughterly Shailoh, when you refer to memories of learning how to see subtle “light-colors,” the highlights and shadows having warm or cool colors, this was a surprising example: apples for the teacher.

I went to a grocery store to compare apples with apples, and was struck by how shiny and reflective the skins were on the variety called Red Delicious. When I set them up in my Mount Gretna bedroom studio, the windows let in blue-sky north light from the left, and the incandescent light bulb on the right produced orange light. I was surprised by the phenomenon of both warm and cool “light-color” in the highlights and double shadows, and by each apple skin reflecting the warped image of the adjacent apples, as well as the white of the underlying tabletop.

This simple pastel drawing turned out to be one of the most intense and delightful exercises in observation that I’ve ever undertaken. It’s a world of lights and colors!

A self-portrait for the Mount Gretna Art Show

It occurs to me now, forty-plus years later, that it was one of the privileges and delights of living together as a family to have pop-up opportunities to share with my daughters points of discovery in my own journey as a visual artist.

Shailoh, your reference to our shared ability to draw brings up this memory: after art school and moving back to Gretna, several years later, when you were around six, on the day before the annual art show, you heard that there was to be a children’s art competition, and you decided to draw a self-portrait. There was a teachable moment when I saw you standing in front of the bathroom mirror with clipboard and paper and pastels, and I said something like, “When I was your age, my mom and dad gave me a Christmas present, a ‘Jon Gnagy Learn To Draw’ set with a book, explaining that, when you draw a face, remember that the eyes are halfway between the chin and the top of the head…see that in the mirror? And that the head is about five eyes wide. And then, with those reminders, just draw what you see, with your natural, brain-to-hand intuition.”

You drew a very observant and convincing portrait of yourself in the mirror, and won first prize! Maybe someday we will find that picture in our archives too.

And I’m proud of you, for your years of serving as an intuitive art educator, anthropologist-philosopher, listening well to your students and helping them get un-stuck so they can press on in their own pilgrimages. I’m curious about your next steps, about the dynamics of convergence in bringing art into palliative care.

And now that you have a daughter too, I’m wondering how we might help her learn to see the world with eyes of wonder!

love & wonder,
Your Daddy Bob

In 2018, while teaching at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK), I conjured up a summer assignment for the incoming cohort of the Master of Photography & Society students. They were arriving from Brazil, China, Germany, Uganda—from all over the globe—with impressive professional portfolios.

I invited them to momentarily put aside their polished work and go back, in a kind of time machine, to their formative years, wondering:

How did you learn to see the world?
How did the visual vocabulary of your upbringing influence you?
What images were etched into your retina before you became a professional photographer?

The actual assignment was to collect a hundred images of things you saw before you were ten years old.

As usual, I also participated in the exercise, giving the students a window into my world. An assignment that became an archeological dig. Immediately, I was flooded with memories that took me back to the woods of Mount Gretna and into your studio in the front bedroom of our family home.

For the first three years of my life, you were attending Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. My earliest memories are of chalk dust, of being turned upside down while playing in the camera obscura on the lawn, and of doodling on your lap during church. I remember the smell of paint, the drawers of sketches, and the myriad reference images you took of us.

There we are, with towels on our heads posing as shepherds; suspended upside down to become Alice and the Rabbit falling into Wonderland; shapeshifting into a boy, a queen, an archer, a patient, an astronaut. The photos were way too weird to be included in our family album, so I never saw them after they were made. But I do remember you making them. So I asked you: “Do you still have those reference images? They must be somewhere in the attic.”

One advantage of you being a hoarder is that they were indeed still there. And with some digging, you found them. What a treasure trove: dusty boxes of slides and prints with such peculiar pictures. For over thirty years, these images had been in hiding. Most of them had not been touched or looked at since you took them, each made for a single purpose only: to be used as reference images for your illustration practice which lasted for ten years of my childhood (1983–1993).

So here it is at last, a first glimpse of the way the light falls—a bridge between us.

there are the bloodlines
  strands of DNA
    storylines
  the traces we draw 
between us
 stars appear
   constellations connect
     things happen, stories told
   pictures taken, images emerge
  still there
 never the same again

Drawing Lessons

And then, there is this shared ability to draw, a knack we can trace back to my grandmother, who could draw charcoal portraits of women from newspaper fashion illustrations, and to her father, who could draw breathtakingly realistic and anatomically correct horses from memory, all the way back to people drawing bison on the walls of their caves.

You taught me how to draw, sitting on your lap. That is, you taught me how to really see things, to notice how things actually appear to us: as surfaces, ever-changing with light. How the world shrinks and fades into the distance with atmospheric perspective. The joints and folds of bodily gestures. Faces, proportions, reflections, layers.

I learned to notice that shadows are not always gray or black; they can be warm or cool— violet, magenta, muddy, moving, dancing. Landscapes and portraits were given the same attention to detail, with scruffy edges alluding to the movement of our eyes.

We do not always see what we think we see, and drawing reveals this even more than photography, which is ultimately a wonderfully lazy way of looking.

After art school, you started making elaborate Degas-style pastel drawings that took days to build up, layer by layer. As an artist feeding our family, I suppose you needed to learn how to work more efficiently, to make quick decisions and crank out illustrations faster. Back then, the quickest way to make figurative drawings was to use photography as a shortcut.

Like this one of me, which started with you finding me sitting on the porch reading in my PJs, with just the right light. You asked if I would pose for you. After many mornings, I got too fidgety, so you took a picture.

For you, reference photographs were never the final product; they were more of a temporary scaffolding, an in-between step to get at something you could imagine but could not draw convincingly. You took photos as studies, as models, as research, and as information gathering.

These pictures were never made to be seen by others. They were for your eyes only, as a reference.

You practiced photography in the most original sense: photo-graph—drawing with light. And the camera? It was just a tool to stop time and make the image portable. To speed things up, to capture the light, only to later re-project it as a slide onto a canvas and draw what you saw in a new light.

These photos do not only refer to the past; they also refer to a future, to a potential painting or drawing. These images are an anticipation; they are expecting an image yet-to-come. The debris of images is a trail of breadcrumbs on a journey of drawing, a time capsule of pre-digital practice, the seeds of new stories.

It is precisely this sense of anticipation that we may also call ‘faith’: to believe in what you cannot see. To look at the world in this way is to acknowledge the unseen in the seen.

You taught me how to make a photo-realistic drawing of something that does not exist. Imagination starts with first studying reality closely.

There is an unintentional documentary in this fiction. The archive testifies not only to what was made, but to how it was made.
There are images that precede anything we have seen.
And images of what we cannot see are often made up of what we can.
The way the light falls makes all the difference.

Your loving daughter,

shailoh

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P.S. Note to the Reader

It is with gratitude and grace that we begin this collaboration, a tribute to creativity and the legacy of my father’s illustration practice.
We trace and explore the archive of images as starting points. Our memories are real yet fallible, perhaps not always reliable. We remember as best we can, knowing that memory is also a kind of fiction.
We stay in dialogue with each other — between father and daughter — exploring our different points of view.
The images are not only documents of the past; we read and explore them now, through the lens of the present.
We could tell a thousand other stories with the same images; to share these particular examples is a way of accepting: it could be otherwise.

We welcome you, dear reader, to walk down memory lane with us, to enter into this conversation, and to share some of your own memories.

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