Three months of trying to capture two entirely different personalities in one shared canvas. Today it finally, properly worked.
Finally delivered the twin portrait I have been working on, on and off, for close to three months now, a genuinely challenging commission that took considerably longer than any single portrait usually requires, specifically because capturing two babies who happen to be identical twins while still making each one recognisably, individually themselves within a single shared canvas turned out to be a considerably more difficult creative problem than I fully anticipated when their mother first approached me about the project back in the spring.
The technical challenge was real and genuinely occupied a great deal of my thinking across these three months, since identical twins share nearly every physical feature a portrait would normally rely on to distinguish one subject from another. I ended up spending an enormous amount of time simply watching them together during several separate sitting sessions, trying to identify the small, specific behavioural differences, one twin’s particular way of tilting her head slightly when curious, the other’s specific, distinctive laugh, that could translate into subtle painted differences even where the actual physical features remained genuinely, properly identical between them.
Delivering the finished portrait to their mother today, I will admit I was not fully prepared for how emotional the moment would end up being, for either of us. She opened the wrapping in her living room, both twins currently down for their afternoon nap upstairs, and simply stood there for a long moment, entirely silent, before finally saying, very quietly, that I had somehow managed to capture exactly what made each of her daughters distinctly, individually herself, a distinction she said she sometimes worries other people, extended family especially, do not always take the time to properly notice given how identical the girls appear at first glance.
I found myself, hearing that specific reaction, genuinely tearing up right there in her living room, which does not happen to me particularly often at a delivery, however emotionally invested I usually am in a finished piece by the time it actually reaches a client’s home. There was something about her specific articulation of what the painting meant, not just as a nice piece of art for the wall but as a small, permanent record insisting that her daughters are two distinct people rather than a matched set, that genuinely moved me more than almost any other client reaction I can remember across several years of doing this work.
I think this is exactly the kind of commission that reminds me why I do this particular work at all, beyond simply the technical satisfaction of solving a genuinely difficult creative problem. A portrait, done properly, is not really about achieving photographic accuracy. It is about paying close enough attention to a person, even a very small person barely old enough to have fully developed a personality yet, that the finished piece captures something true about who they actually, individually are, a task that took three considerably longer months than usual with these two but that feels, today, entirely worth every single one of them.
I am already, somewhat to my own surprise, looking forward to painting them again in a few years, once their individual personalities have developed even further, curious whether the same small behavioural differences I worked so hard to capture today will have grown into something even more distinctly, visibly their own by then.
Their mother mentioned, as I was leaving, that she plans to hang the portrait in the hallway between both girls’ bedrooms specifically, a deliberate choice meant to remind them, as they grow older, that they have always been seen as two distinct people even from this early age, rather than simply as a matched pair defined primarily by their shared appearance. I found that detail genuinely moving, a level of thoughtfulness about the painting’s eventual role in her daughters’ own developing sense of individual identity that goes well beyond what I usually think about when I am simply focused on the technical challenge of getting a commission right.
Driving home afterward, I found myself thinking about how much responsibility a portrait like this one actually carries, well beyond its immediate role as a nice piece of wall art. These two girls will grow up seeing this exact painting every single day, a fixed, permanent visual record of how their family chose to see them at one year old, and I feel, tonight, a genuine, quiet pride at having gotten that specific responsibility right, even if it did take three considerably longer months than any of my other commissions have ever required.
I have already, somewhat sentimentally, started a small private file with photos of the finished piece hanging in its new home, alongside the very first reference sketches I made back in the spring, a modest personal record of the project’s full arc that I suspect I will find myself returning to occasionally over the years, particularly whenever a future commission feels similarly difficult and I need reminding that the hardest ones are so often, eventually, the ones I end up proudest of once they are finally, properly finished.
More from this author at Tinsel Vandergraph, prat.uk.