The Art of Being a Son-in-Law: A Broken Plate and the Series of Drawings It Inspired

Rob Strati,"Sailing Ship Leaving Harbor with Laughing Gulls",
Two Broken plates, ink on paper, 37” x 44.5” x 2.5”, 2025, On view at FREMIN Gallery in NYC

By JOCELYN JANE COX October 26th, 2025

About seven years after my mother died, I accidentally dropped one of her plates on our kitchen floor and it broke. It was one of those iconic Blue Willow transferware plates, blue and white, patterned with pagodas, bridges, and swirly trees. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the biggest shard. For months, it sat on our kitchen island. We shifted it a few inches one way or the other when unpacking groceries or cutting vegetables. 

At some point, my husband Rob started imagining the rest of that plate’s scene whenever he walked by, wondering where the bridge was leading and what the rest of the tree looked like. Though he worked in technology, he was also an artist who could paint, draw, and sculpt in several different mediums. Straight out of college, where he studied Art History, he had gallery shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles before dedicating most of his time to tech. Eventually, he said to me, “I think I want to do something with your mom’s plate?” He brought the fragment back to his art studio in our converted garage, where it sat for several more weeks. 

Fragmented in Blue with Kites and Monks, Broken plate, ink on paper, 31” x 26” x 2.5”, 2025
On view at FREMIN Gallery in NYC
 

My mother didn’t like any of my boyfriends. Not that she said this out loud, but I could tell. Except, from the day she met Rob when we took her out for brunch on one of her day trips from Delaware to New York City, I could see she was comfortable with him in a way she wasn’t with most people. And he was more animated than usual as well. As we waited for our omelets to arrive, I leaned back in the booth, listening to these two introverts — my two favorite people in the world — joking around about how much they both loved coffee. They were hitting it off. 

The fact is that my mother didn’t trust men. She never dated anyone after she and my father split. But after the divorce, she’d started over in her own way. She rejoined the workforce with a series of minimum-wage jobs and eventually, at age 65, she was hired by a local builder to show model homes. These were good years. She learned how to use computers and had fun attending her co-workers’ wedding and baby showers. She even bought her own townhouse which she decorated with artfully-placed plant-cuttings, books, and those blue plates. 

The year after Rob and I got married, my mother joined us for Thanksgiving in our new house near Nyack, NY, about 30 minutes north of Manhattan. In the previous months, Rob and I had both noticed some mental decline, ever since she’d been on leave from work to nurse a fractured hip. She had anxiety about everyday tasks and some small conversational misunderstandings. It was Rob who suggested she stay with us for a while in the little apartment attached to our house. 

“It will be fun to have you here Barbara!” He tried to convince her. “After all,” he added kindly, “it is a mother-in-law suite.” 

She agreed, reluctantly. Her subsequent decline was precipitous. She suddenly couldn’t remember certain words or follow the plot of a book. She spent her days sobbing, devastated by the loss of her faculties. Admittedly, I was devastated too. 

While I went to work in the afternoons, Rob, who was working from home at the time, invited her out for drives between his meetings. Sometimes he picked up coffees for them at the Art Cafe and drove over to the Hudson River. She loved looking at the water. They sat together in the parking lot watching the sun sparkle across the river’s surface, either remarking on it or just staying quiet. I didn’t ask Rob to do any of this and could never have imagined that my husband would so genuinely love and care for my mother. He often told me how much he admired her. So many people roll their eyes when they mention their in-laws, but my husband and my mother were friends.  

After a difficult downward plummet, she passed away from dementia and other ailments the following year. I kept as many of her belongings as our house could contain, including that Blue Willow plate I unfortunately broke. 

On January 6, 2021, I walked back to Rob’s studio. “Do you see what’s going on in D.C.?” I said with alarm. Rob wasn’t at his computer. He was standing at his drafting table, drawing for the first time in a while. 

“Yes.” We looked at each other solemnly. I turned and headed back to the television, watching as our capital was attacked. 

That night, Rob presented to me the segment of my mother’s plate attached to a piece of paper. On it, he’d drawn the rest of the scene in a dreamy way, so that it expanded across the page, lines and squiggles taking flight, as if the plate’s breaking had set everything in the picture free. I swallowed hard, unsure if I’d ever seen anything more beautiful. In this drawing, I saw his love for me and for my mother, how gentle and respectful he was with her. I saw his fear for our country and his uncanny ability to intuit the best in people and situations. I saw how he was processing pain. I saw, mostly, his wonder. 

Fragmented in Blue with Kites and Monks, Broken plate, ink on paper, 31” x 26” x 2.5”, 2025,
On view at FREMIN Gallery in NYC
 

I shared a photo of his artwork on social media and it quickly accumulated hearts and comments: Stunning, Breathtaking, I have one of those plates. Since then, he’s broken more chipped or damaged plates, on purpose, dropping them against a rock in his studio. They started in blue, my mother’s favorite color, but he’s gone on to work with red, black, and green plates with varying patterns, featuring geese taking flight, sails floating into the sky, and windmills swirling. The illustrations stretch out and away with details both abstract and realistic, intricate and whimsical. 

Collectors from New York to London to Hong Kong now have these pieces hanging on their walls. People say the work reminds them of their mothers’ or grandmothers’ china. The drawings make them think about what might have happened differently or what could be. The reaction, from where I sit, has been downright thrilling. I try to imagine my mother’s delight that something she’d owned had gone on to touch so many in this unique way. That first piece still  hangs in our dining room. 

What I didn’t know as a kid, when I was watching my mother weather her disappointment and depression after her divorce, was that her life, which seemed ruined at the time, was going to get much better, at least for a while. The breaking of her marriage was eventually going to provide her with new freedoms and confidence, laughter, and a few decades more beautiful than the ones before. This was the state she was in when Rob first met her. 

Rob was laid off from his corporate job in January, 2023. He decided to pursue art, and specifically his Fragmented series, full-time. Every few weeks, I hear a plate shatter in his studio. I don’t wince. Eventually, I wander back to see what he’s up to. I watch his hand deftly create new stories from the jagged edge of the plate. Hot air balloons, flowers, and hawks alight, heading toward a sunset. Of course, not every crisis results in beauty, but we can dream. WM