Joe Fafard
"Memories Live On"
Joe Fafard | Mon Père
Run Time: 4:31, Size:5.6MB
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Transcript
After a few months of doing various caricatures, suddenly – January 14th, 1972 - my father died, and it was as a big shock, of course. I was 29, and he was 61. And we were growing closer and closer together all the time, so I had an urge to do a portrait of him, but I wasn’t going to treat it like the caricatures that I had been doing. I wanted to get some real feeling and emotion into it. So the image came to me just by remembering him, because that’s the way he often sat as we talked in the kitchen or in the living room. He had this habit of just leaning on his elbows, with his elbows on his knees like that so that was my first reaction to selecting a pose. I worked on it for probably a month after his funeral, and it had a big influence on the way that I chose to continue working afterwards, after having done this piece, because when I showed it to my family, my mother and sisters, some of them immediately broke up into tears, so it really moved them. And that moved me because I had done it, tearfully. So it was a way to make art work as a catharsis, a way of dealing with our grief, and a way of remembering, and way of trying to ensure that memories live on.
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