Hand Painted Family Portrait: Holiday Card 2012
Who needs the Instagram/Flickr photo wars when you can keep it real 18th century style with a hand painted family portrait instead?
As part of our effort to revive this lost art via our family holiday card, we decided to tap into the immensely talented pool of alumni from the School of Visual Arts MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program that Matthew has had the pleasure of teaching in for many years. I remembered meeting Rebecca Zomchek at the graduate thesis show and knew she could perfectly capture our vision of “realistic, with somewhat awkward and serious pose and symbolic elements, a la The Royal Tennenbaums movie poster and The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan Van Eyck.” Everything in the painting (including our clothing!) represents events or milestones that happened in our family over the past year. Cooper participated in the art direction and was very adamant about the fact that he wanted Rebecca to correctly render his shoes.
We printed the cards 6″x6″ square, and sent to family and friends in a kraft paper envelope decorated with stamps of hand-drawn art.
Huge thanks again to Rebecca for working with us to create this amazing keepsake and helping us start a kick-ass tradition we plan on continuing every year.
In the Halloween wake of Hurricane Sandy, our little 6 and F trains were, quite literally, the only subways running at the time. Matthew outdid himself yet again and created another gorgeous, completely custom handcrafted subway car — though scaled down slightly to fit Holden! Cooper wanted to wear his for the third year in a row with an updated train line (in prior years, it was formerly a 
All boys in NYC love riding the subway — and what they love even more are those little wooden train cars. We easily have the entire mini-MTA in our living room. So, there wasn’t really a question this year that we’d celebrate Cooper’s 5th birthday at his favorite place, the NY Transit Museum.
My sister and her husband love baseball so, naturally, when my nephew turned one we had to pay homage to America’s pastime with an all-star baseball party in their backyard.
Holden has always turned heads and made ladies swoon. My mother calls him “her Hollywood hunk,” so, when the time came to plan his first birthday, which falls during Oscar season, it seemed fitting to turn him into a movie star!
Matthew spent several sleepless nights hand-crafting (from scratch!) this stunning subway replica Halloween costume — AND it lights up, people! Go dad!