FRAN FORMAN
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Fran Forman (1945- ) began creating digital art in 1992, two years after the public appearance of Photoshop and has been using the software ever since. She is known for two distinct ways in which she works with photography and computer-based imagery. In the early 2000s, her work typically combined saturated pictorial superimpositions of texture, antigravity hoverings of bodies and objects, reflections and surreal atmospheres. To assemble these works, Forman created an extensive image library that included photographs and scans of tintypes and daguerreotypes, damaged photographs, family albums, old paper and books, distressed walls and wood any surface that could be added and layered in Photoshop to create her other-worldly imagery.
A representative revealed uncollage from this period is Journey (2006). Forman's recent approach to image making is almost exclusively created using her photography and her approach in handling composite imagery is more about concealed joinery and the blending of selected images. She often takes pictures of pictures in museums as well as commissioning models for all of her imagery. It is as if in her new work, Forman uses photography to generate her own found photos. Her 2018 Two Wimples is a convincing scene that never took place at a single moment in time and space. Forman sees herself more as a choreographer or film director than a digital artist, a term she dislikes. In her own words, Forman self-identifies as "a painter who uses digitally captured photography", which poetically brings us full circle.
Fran Forman’s photo-paintings are in the permanent collections of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM, Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Grace Museum, Abilene, The Sunnhordland Museum, Norway, and the North Down Museum, Northern Ireland.
Fran has had many solo exhibitions, including the famed Henry Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, England, and The Griffin Museum of Photography and the Massachusetts State House. She has won numerous significant awards and prizes; most recently, first place from the Julia Margaret Cameron awards, three awards (First Place, Gold and Silver) from PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Paris 2012. In 2011, she was invited to exhibit and attend the China 2nd Biennial International Photographic Cultural Festival and Exhibition, Lishui, China (one of only thirty Americans