I’m trying to remember when I stopped blogging regularly here, and I think it was around 2017 when TJ and I started preparing for a major portfolio review in NYC. We spent the six months before it focusing on our book, planning bigger shoots with better styling, working on magazine commissions, spec editorial shoots, set building, networking and printing. And all of it was pretty much for naught, because when we finally got to meet with the agency we thought we would fit right into, we were told that I was getting to be of the age that women want kids, and no one would want to invest in us and have me turn around and want to stay home with babies. The only reason I wasn’t devastated by the whole thing is that I could tell myself that we would have been signed then and there if we were younger, or not a married duo, or if I was a man, or anything else that we weren’t. The photos weren’t the problem, it was the photographers, and I decided I could live with that.

We continued pressing on, working even harder, booking more work, making more and more amazing things that I never shared. But as 2018 rolled on I think some of what was said to us in NYC sunk in. I started to think that maybe it wasn’t a rejection exactly, but some kind of divine suggestion. We stared to plan to buy a house, rather than trips to NYC to test with agencies. We found a home, started to work on it and started to plan fewer and fewer shoots. By summer of 2019 I was spending more time designing wardrobe, collecting antiques, making corsets, and throwing up daily from my morning sickness that never went away. And then 2019 became 2020 and we had a newborn while the world shut down and the idea of a photoshoot lost all appeal entirely.

We did start shooting again, none of which has ever been blogged about, maybe I’ll do it one of these days, but it was very cautiously, sparingly, mostly only taking the time for paying gigs and art once or twice a year. Then in 2022 another baby who suddenly is not so much a baby anymore, another break from shoots and more time photographing my children. It’s only in the last year that I got a real itch to start real creative shoots again, that I could process the last five or seven years of turmoil and figure out what I wanted to actually create. I do continue to go back and forth on whether or not I’m just insane and should give it all up so I can keep the house clean and finally master growing lettuce, but we’ll see.

That is to say that, and if you’ve read the past several entries you know I keep doing this, journaling, claiming to be back, but I think this is truly a new beginning. And I thought, since Mother’s Day is around the corner, I’d kick it off with a shoot we planned with our friends and frequent collaborators Phiphi and Elysa, who just happen to have kids about the same age as ours. When I found out Elysa was pregnant with a third, I knew we had to squeeze in a mom and kids-shoot before we didn’t match quite so well.

I’d had the idea of a splatter painted backdrop with a splatter painted dress floating around in my head for ages, but when I combined it with having the kids be actively painting, it finally fell into place as a concept. I had yards and yards of white taffeta lying around, so I painted that, then a white seamless, made prop painters palettes, and ordered my mom to make some vintage looking artist smocks for the kids. Black berets I picked up in Paris, and a lovely brush set I’d given to my 4 year old for her birthday were the crowning touch.

 

It was a challenging day, and I didn’t realize how uncomfortable I felt getting my hair and makeup done, we all had to stop over and over again to comfort our insane toddlers, and Elysa handed out so many squeezy things of apple sauce I lost count. We all wore the same fabric, draped three different ways, which added it’s own stress, but the effect was well worth while. In the end, it was a mess, but a mess that held within it a much deeper version of beauty than I’d expected, much like motherhood itself.

*****Kayt

Date: November 23rd, 2024
Location: Worcester, MA
Photography: TJ Bynes and Kayt Silvers
Makeup: Phiphi Liang
Hair: Elysa Urikiel
Wardrobe: Kayt Silvers