Family Portrait

Maria 1+2 Silk-screen, 2012

“Family Portrait” is a song about a broken home. Pink experienced her parents divorce when she was nine and explores their problems through her perspective as a child. She told Entertainment Weekly:

That was from a poem that I wrote when I was 9 when my dad left. My mom cried for four days when she heard it. I’ve seen my dad cry three times and that was one of them; that was awful. And then my stepmom cried. She’s so strong — she was an Army nurse in Vietnam, and I’d never seen her cry. That was a song I wrote for me, and I didn’t realize how much it was going to hurt them.

In college, I had the opportunity to learn more mediums, and as a story teller, so much of your end result is about the process — it was a real big time of discovery for me.

I got really into the process of print making - that uncertainty in layering and creating the same image over and over again, but at the same time having this uniqueness. Together and alone at the same time. 

My subject matter focused a lot on my family, My parents were getting divorced and I felt really helpless during it all. I thought a lot about my family, I was living in another state, I was very very homesick. I mourned and spent a lot of time making art about them.

I was probably using my art as some excuse to immortalize my parents and my sister, accepting them as three separate units, instead of my family—I did a lot of portraits.

Romanticize them. Keep them with me. If I drew them, it’s almost as if we were together. If I did these long-layered prints of them, it was another way of presenting my deep desire to be close to them. Spending so much time invested in creating these pieces and spending so much time with my mirage of a family.