Fran Forman

There's a new artist at the Commercial Street gallery! Fran Forman is a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She is also a recipient of grants from the Tyre Foundation and the Pufflin Foundation, for 2006, 2007-2008. She teaches workshops in digital montage, and her work has been exhibited widely. Most recently, she was a winner in PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris and Adobe/Photoworkshop.com.

Fran combines her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, the non-human world, and the dislocations of time and place.

My images often begin with discarded 19^th and early 20^th century photographic portraits, scavenged from old family albums and flea markets. I collect portraits of people that I find intriguing, ambiguous, or mysterious. I then scan the images, often of poor quality, at a very high resolution, and begin the laborious task of altering the portrait.

I play with the characters as if sprites on a stage. I try out different backdrops and settings, incorporating my photographs or paintings, which I collage and reassemble. My characters go through weeks of revisions, as I move them through many worlds, playing with narrative and composition.

I do not use ordinary paint or brushes: I substitute an electronic stylus and mouse for brushes, light and tablet for palette, the monitor for canvas, and photographic paper for the finished canvas.

The final images are an amalgam of photography and painting with pixels, digitally assembled. Images are then printed on Fujicolor Crystal Archive (silver halide) photographic paper, and printed in editions of ten.

-Fran Forman

See more of her work here (and read more of her bio).

above: The Journey, silver halide print, 28" x 29", $800