The latest theme for Mixed Media Monday is men, and as soon as I saw it I had no doubt. It was time to unearth the photographs of my grandfather, his father and his grandfather and do something with them.

The piece evolved naturally—painted and sanded cardboard for the base, a scrap of muslin rubbed with distress ink, a collage background paper made by scanning and juxtaposing vintage ephemera with a sienna canvas I painted a while ago, and, drawing the eye, the pictures of my ancestors.

Mixed media take on my ancestors for the Mixed Media Monday Men challenge

It is funny how they really looked like one another and yet I know their personalities were very different. Ferdinando, my great-great-grandfather, was a one-time soldier (a bad one, by his own account) and a fencing master who gave up the sword to become a civil servant and thus please my great-great-grandmother, Angela, a concrete, practical type who rather preferred him to have a steadier job. He had a quirky sense of humour and loved to journal—many of his entries are on the back of old military papers, or on photographs and are addressed to the descendants he would one day have.

Armando, his son, was an elegant, quiet type who died at 33, leaving behind a young, penniless wife and four children, who all went to live with different relatives. Nando, my grandfather, was brought up by Ferdinando and Angela, but none of Angela’s practical streak rubbed on to him. Despite a successful banking career, he remained a naive dreamer all his life—to the point that people occasionally took advantage of him. He was incredibly fond of children and animals and a really really good man. I still miss him—and I even miss the other two, even though I never met them.