Every family has a story to tell, and the Ferris clan is no exception.

Their uniqueness lies in the fact that parents and children are artists, who all use similar styles and explore similar themes. As their exhibition at the Evanston Art Center illustrates, a penchant for creating works that are both figurative and narrative, exists in the Ferris genes like curly hair and high foreheads run in others.

Represented in the Evanston show are works by Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, a Chicago painter who has exhibited locally and nationally for three decades, her deceased husband, Mike Ferris and their children, daughter Emile and son Michael Jr.

All four artists present elaborate fantasy worlds in their works.

Mike Ferris, who died two years ago, earned his living as a commercial artist, at various times designing McDonald's Happy Meals toys, inventing board games and freelancing as an illustrator for the Chicago Tribune. He spent most of his free time sketching and painting, but didn't pursue fame or prestige as a visual artist. Ferris, the son of Lebanese immigrants who died when he was young, made entertaining chil-dren his main purpose in life, his wife says.

"He'd laugh at the rest of us for trying to become well-known artists," recalls Spiess-Ferris, who met her husband in a painting class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "He'd say that children in the Gobi Desert played with his toys. We couldn't touch that."

In his work Ferris experimented with a wide range of styles, switching back and forth between loose, energetic lines and intricately detailed cross-hatching. His drawings are epic in scope, demonstrating his in-terest in history and the passions that rule humanity. Figures crowd into ambiguous pictorial spaces, in some places morphing into different characters or dissolving altogether. One graphite drawing titled "The Director" includes Roman soldiers restraining a Christ-like figure, a Nazi guard holding a skull and a male figure standing in the middle of it all, as if deciding how to orchestrate the actions of his cast of characters.

Echoes of such theatricality can be found in Spiess-Ferris's paintings. Her earlier scenes in particular tend to be quieter, dreamy and rendered with the meticulousness and clarity of northern Renaissance paintings. She usually focuses on women engaged somehow with natural elements, symbols for her ecological concerns. In one oil painting, for instance, a woman stands in water up to her waist with four swan finger-puppets attached to her hand, one swan nursing her breast.

Emile's pen-and-ink drawings possess a similarly surreal sensibility. She gravitates toward drawing female figures in a natural setting, but executes them with the exacting lines found in some of her father's work. One recent drawing portrays a group of men, one of whom lifts up a fold of skin on his chest to bare a tiny, red replica of Jerusalem. Above the men's heads prowls a wolf-like nude female.

Michael Jr. relies heavily on the figure to explore themes of identity and memory. His sculptures and paintings, also on view in a solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center through Jan. 5, synthesize the influences of objects decorating his childhood home, including Outsider art and African masks. His ex-pertise in Syrian end table patterns pervade his work, such as the thick, geometrically detailed wood frames holding a series of pensive portraits.

Michael Jr.'s life-sized sculptures made front bits of found wood are more whimsical. "Rusty Finnegan" measures roughly eight feet tall and is a likeness of the artist's alter ego. On the figure's head stands a portrait gallery exhibiting dozens of countenances, and his hands hold a Polaroid camera.

"We're getting to see the ideas that are in the character's head," muses Spiess-Ferris. "He's overwhelmed because he has to balance that big, heavy apparatus."