Gulati Family Session
It’s hard to believe it’s only been three years since we created a beautiful family oil portrait for Gauri and her family. That portrait is now displayed over the fireplace in their family room.
As Mary always says, you only get 18 summers before your family landscape changes forever. Guari and Rak are experiencing this as Rohan, their first born son, is off to the University of Virignia for his freshman year. We are so thankful we were able to help capture this major milestone with one last family portrait, an oil of the three boys, and Rohan's first individual oil painting. Over the next few years, we will be creating coordinating oil portraits for Seaan and Shiv. We already have the matching frames ready when the time comes.
Rak, Guari, and especially their sons, love Dave Matthews Band almost as much as we do and we can’t wait for the boys to choose their favorite concert track for Jamie to paint their oil to. Rak remembers Dave Matthews from hanging around his fraternity house and of course from their beginnings at Millers and Traks. We find it so cool that so many of our clients follow the band and experience the same joy that we get from listening to this amazing band from Charlottesville. Virginia.
We began the session with a few poses in our garden. The last family portrait was created in the winter and it was so cold that we just had time enough time to run outside and take a few shots and then run inside to get warm. Gauri wanted to have the boys come back in warmer weather fo individual shots, but time just got in the way. The boy’s button down, solid black shirts dressed up the mood while the khaki pants and bare feet made the portrait feel authentic and suited their personalities. After finishing outside, we moved indoors for a more modern style of black and white images. This look would be a great contrast to their traditional Indian attire, which was the families choice last time. We loved honoring the heritage and traditions using the Indian clothing that Gauri brought back from a recent trip to see her family. However, our black and white oil paintings were the perfect style to highlight each of the boys’s personalities and their facial features, since they look more like men than boys now.
Working fast to keep the boys engaged, we quickly worked through each consecutive pose, until we had just the right amount of variety to fill an album from.
Gauri selected one of our favorite poses for the main oil painting that will be visible to any guest entering their home and a constant reminder of why they work so hard to create the lasting memories. The boys smiles and personalities came through with perfection in this image. As soon as we all saw the image first appear on our computer monitor, we knew it was the one.
We were so impressed by Rohan’s desire to create a memory album of this important time in his life, with his brothers and his parents by his side. He is such a great young man and we know we will see great things from him in the future. It’s priceless moments like these that affirm why we do what we do each and every day.
