Charrois Family

This mural was painted to show a typical winter evening in the Charrois family home during the 1940‘s.

Jean-Baptiste and Claudia Charrois were the proud parents of eleven children. Claudia is seen working on the family loom, accompanied by her daughters Alexandra and Simone. The loom is of great importance to the family as it is now displayed in the Provincial Museum of Alberta. Jean-Baptiste is smoking his favorite pipe near his sons, Patrick and Leo, who are playing the violin and the accordion, respectively. At the table, Aurel and Willie are playing chess, while their brothers Gloria, Adrien and Antonio play cards. Adelia and Adeloza are knitting in the foreground of the mural.

The family never had a proper chance to be all together under the same roof, as the eldest had already left home when the youngest was born. The mural was unveiled at a family reunion in 2000 and the Charrois family was delighted to see it.

Karen is a friend of the Charrois family, which made it all the more smoother to research and sketch a draft for the mural. At first glance, the heads seem a little too big for their bodies. Karen had to undergo the difficult task of taking head-shots from wedding pictures, then transforming them to create a casual, relaxed setting. “They’re all standing up, stiff as boards, with this not necessarily happy expression on their faces.” Oil lamps are the source of light in the painting, and in order to understand the effect the lighting would have, Karen lit one of her own lamps to see how far the light reached and the effect it had on different surfaces. “I shut the lights [off] and I lit it, and I thought, Oh my God, it has a whole foot around it that’s lit. How can we light a room with one lamp?” Karen then tried three lamps, with no success. In order to have a mural that was bright and full of detail, she exaggerated the lighting.