The chart on our wall is a tree of bare branching lines. It carries no names and no dates, and that blankness is the point.
Lineage without people. A real family-tree chart is a document: names, dates, marriages, evidence. Ours is a drawing of the idea itself — branches dividing and dividing again, in ink lines only. It promises ancestry the way a closed book promises a story: by shape, not by content.
That restraint is also honesty. Every sitter at this desk is fictional, so a chart naming ancestors would be a forged document hanging in the frame. Bare branches forge nothing. They say only that every invented life is imagined as having come from somewhere.
Composing with the chart. Keep it on the wall, softly out of focus, behind the sitter — never on the desk, never legible. At portrait distance it should read as a quiet diagram of branches, the way a map reads as coastline when you cannot see the labels. If a render sharpens it into text, the frame is culled.
One chart per gallery is the rule of thumb for emphasis; here it hangs in every frame because it is the house mark, the way other studios keep a window or a lamp.