I have long been drawn to and inspired by artists and art forms that evoke solitude, mystery, or self-reflection through color, chiaroscuro, and geometry. I pay particular homage to the patterns and abstractions of Edward Hopper, whose solitary figures seem absorbed in self-reflection; to the 17th-century Dutch masters who used light to evoke emotion; and to the foreboding sparseness, slashes of light, alienated protagonists, and stylization of noir cinematography.

Merging the KNOWN and the UNKNOWN:

New Work by Fran Forman

Fran Forman’s visual language is a fusion of photography and painting, merging magic realism and surrealism. While honing her incredible craftsmanship as a graphic designer, her imagination was captured by the emotive power of photography. Forman reveals life’s discrepancies between the conventional and the unknown. Her images are mythical narratives of dreams and fables, suffused with colours that transform them to a visionary plane. A latent angst seeps through unearthly calm. Recurring motifs from unknown realms break through the barriers of reality. Primordial symbols are translated into conventional awareness and incongruous juxtapositions. They are submitted to an austere sense of composition, acting as energy transformers and moulders of consciousness.

Forman’s approach is empirical, rooted in her personal experience of motherhood and selftransformation. From her late mother she inherited a trove of family photos which she uses over and over again, combining them with photographs of contemporary children or unknown children from long ago. This is her link between past and present.

Size: 7.5″ x 11″ | 27 color images | 20 pp

Enchanted Constructions:

Photographic Collages by Fran Forman

Fran Forman is a photographic artist who uses her imagination to take flight into new realms of seeing, feeling, and experiencing created worlds. Like a great chef or a bewitching magician, she uses her considerable talents to translate sensory experiences into photographic collages that draw from memory, history, and fantasy. Her images are poetic, filled with metaphors that evoke the conflict of being rooted to the earth while yearning to be elsewhere. Forman’s photographs pull us backwards and forwards, into the past and into the subconscious, drawing out our own memories of childhood, of growing up, of desire and loss.

Each image is a journey in itself, each with a suitcase packed full of ideas and visual suggestions that allow the viewer their own expedition through color, memory, and connection. She provides us with enough space to time travel, through the past and into the future. That yin and yang of seeing is what makes her work so special.

Size: 8.5″ x 11″ | 52 color images | 32 pp