Trac, Forrest and Scott (2020)

By Boris M. Torres

In 2019, I saw a portrait that Joaquín Sorolla had painted of his children at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid, and I was very moved by it. The painting glowed with love. I thought about how wonderful it is for me to be a dad, and how lucky I am to be having the experience of fathering my two children. In that moment, in front of Sorolla’s portraits, I also realized that I had never seen a painting in a public art space like a museum or a gallery that represented a family like mine, a queer family with children. I knew what my next project would be- to make a series of paintings that depicted diverse queer families.

As I began this project, the pandemic began, and instead of photographing queer families myself, as I had initially intended, I asked people to send me their favorite family photographs to work from. The photos people have sent have been deeply personal, less staged than ones I might have created, and the subjects feel natural in their homes. Portraiture has always been a form of exalting the human, memorializing the personal. In capturing the intimate and immediate nature of these families, as well as the touch and tenderness made permanent in the works, these paintings give a voice and presence to families like mine who have been historically excluded from our national story.