LEIDIGHIN

Recently, my sister Robin Soster and I commissioned Cassia Leidigh to paint portraits of each of our six children’s faces as a Christmas gift for our parents. The results were outstanding.

The Soster and White children range in age from 5 to 16, but Cassia painted each as a toddler...in effect, creating a whole wall-full of colorful three-year-old cousins.

Cassia worked from dozens of still photographs collected from scrapbooks, frames, and storage bins. This was not her preference. Portrait painters like to sit with their subjects, talk with them, look at their expressions. But she made the best of what Robin and I could scrounge up.