Family Portrait III - The Savannah Years

by Michael R Hayter · Bristol, GB

This drawing is the third in a series of imaginary family portraits I had worked on. Each successive portrait was more bizarre than the one that had preceded it, so that this one is the most outlandish of them all. To all intents and purposes this is a normal, traditional nuclear family - except that the mother is a lion. One of the sons holds his exposed penis in his hand, but nobody in the group appears to have noticed this. The portrait is taken on the African savannah, a black panther lolls in the branch of a tree above their heads, yet the family (bar the mother) is dressed in Western suburban clothes - they seem incongruously out of place. Except, that is, for the mother - who is a lion. She, for one, is in her natural environment. This sense of displacement geographically, lends the image a dream-like unease. The family (again, bar the mother) appears to be at odds with its surroundings. I like to play with unusual juxtapositions like this, to exaggerate or draw attention to the qualities of the different elements in a work. It raises many questions, and when thought about, leads to the making of many connections previously unconceived of.