Whether it’s da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, or an Alex Katz rendering of his wife, Ada, nothing quite grabs us like a portrait. After all, it’s only human to study other people. And when faces are captured on canvas, we’re free to stare in a way we’d never (one hopes) do in a store, restaurant, or on the street. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is famous or anonymous, our eyes seek to meet the man or woman looking back at us.

Sitting in the sun or posing in a powder blue suit before a big date, the folks in the work of Highland Park artist Jacqueline Kott-Wolle might be anyone. These images, mundane yet special— as the most quotidian moment is to the one living it—are drawn from photos of her family and their friends. And while Kott-Wolle’s works chronicle Jewish life, there’s a good deal of universality in her specificity.

As she created Growing Up Jewish–Art & Storytelling, Kott- Wolle had Fairfield Porter in mind, the 20th-century, Winnetka- born artist whose work often depicted his family at leisure at their summer home in Maine. “Where Porter captured images of his friends playing tennis together, I found images of my family on vacation in the Catskills at one of the famed Jewish resorts of the 1960s. Where Porter created paintings of beautiful family Christmas celebrations, I found images of my family celebrating the Jewish festivals of Passover or Rosh Hashanah. Who can’t connect to a holiday celebration with multiple generations sharing a meal together? Who hasn’t wondered about the travails of past generations and felt grateful to live in a free society where there is an opportunity for a better life, even with all of our current challenges?”

Based on five generations of vintage photographs, Kott-Wolle’s paintings form both a family portrait and a cultural testament. “It was important for me to document the challenges that my grandparents and parents had to overcome as Holocaust survivors who arrived in Canada as refugees,” relates Kott-Wolle. “Equally important was the question of what it means to be Jewish in the face of American-style freedom and the pull toward assimilation. Can one be fully identified with both traditional Judaism and American life? How will my children and future generations connect to their heritage?”

Kott-Wolle concluded the series of forty canvases with Ice Cream Dreams at St. Faustin, which depicts her mother and her mother’s parents enjoying cones while on vacation in the countryside in the 1950s. “That vacation and its simple pleasure came only a few short years after the devastation they endured in the Holocaust,” notes Kott-Wolle “In studying that photo and translating it into a painting, I realized that I am so very fortunate to have lived in two countries—Canada and the United States— where my freedom to engage or not engage with my religion is guaranteed.”

After moving to the North Shore with her husband, David, in 2004 (the couple has three children aged 16 to 23), Kott-Wolle found a creative home at The Highland Park Art Center, where she was mentored by landscape painter and mixed media artist, Ina Beierle. Determined in those early days to “hold on to my memories of precious summer vacations,” Kott-Wolle painted from pictures of her children at the beach. “I once asked Ina if she thought it was ridiculous that I only wanted to paint my kids and her answer provided the exact encouragement and ‘permission’ I needed. Ina said, ‘When you paint, say what you need to say until you’re finished saying it. And when you are done, use your art to say something else.’ There was something so liberating about not being judged or evaluated. I was free to express my deepest emotions, using my paintbrushes.”

Family photos, no matter the family, can be a source of sweet memory and even mirth (“Look at that wallpaper! Can you believe I wore my hair like that?”). But when the people pictured have passed and that living room is long gone, the snapshots of our lives can be sad and, sometimes, inscrutable. Kott-Wolle’s subjects— their celluloid mortality translated into paint—seem to rise above hard truth. Many of her pictures project an unmistakable echo of good times together. But when they touch on something other than joy, she doesn’t change a sour face to a smile or straighten a back to its youthful uprightness or ignore, in the text accompanying these images, tough times and unrealized expectations. She accepts life in every aspect, in sunlight and in shade.

For more information, visit paintingsbyjacquelinekottwolle.com.