The Middlesex Beat, July 2006

By Terry House

...the Belmont Gallery of Art showcases Forman’s arresting, resonant visual narratives – “photographic assemblages” featuring flea market tintypes digitized within evocative, surrealistic settings. The exhibit, aptly entitled Transitions, references not only transitions in photography and technology - in Forman’s words, “the incredible speed in which we’re transitioning from nineteenth century perspectives into the twenty-first century” - but transitions in Forman’s own life, as well.

Growing up in Baltimore, Fran Forman drew “incessantly,” winning her first art award at the age of seven. “I continued drawing all through my teens - first copying fashion models from magazines - and always drawing the human form; but I couldn’t draw a tree to save my life,” she chuckles. “Later, I concentrated on faces, and I still do.” Forman’s youthful dream of becoming “a great illustrator” eventually gave way to the contemporary zeitgeist of the day: “The 60’s arrived, and I thought I should save the world instead of indulging what I perceived as my personal narcissism,” she explains. “I didn’t realize then that art can change the world!”

After high school, Forman moved to the Boston area to attend Brandeis University. There, inspired by the social and political activism of the time, she majored in sociology. Art retained a hold on her heart, however. “I spent a lot of time in the art studio, painting the human form,” she recalls. Galvanized during her undergraduate years, Forman left Brandeis “with a whole new identity and social conscience;” and her art reflected this dramatic transition. “The drawings I did during that period were replete with angst and anger, reflecting my own internal turmoil and burgeoning political and social consciousness,” she states.

After college, a career in the arts felt to Forman “altogether too hedonistic and self-involved.” She entered Simmons College’s School of Social Work, eventually earning an MSW. As a social worker, Forman counseled returning Vietnam veterans and joined the staff of Cambridge Hospital’s substance abuse clinic; and while she continued drawing and painting, she also developed a deep passion for photography.

“I remember the actual moment when I realized my life’s work was in the arts and that there was a way to combine my commitment to social service with my personal art,” Forman recalls today. The unlikely setting for this epiphany was the Israeli kibbutz where Forman, on a break from her job back in the States, had gone to paint bomb shelters. “I met an American teacher of design, and when he told me what graphic designers do, I decided then and there to re-tool and become a graphic designer!” she recounts. “I knew immediately that the field of graphic design could combine my varied interests in art, human behavior, communication, psychology, and that it could indeed serve the public.”

Upon her return to America, Forman enrolled in Boston University, where she studied photography and graphic design. “As a child of the 60’s, I had eschewed anything that smacked of commercialism,” she explains. “Now I understood that graphic design is the intersection of fine art and commerce.” Forman was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977. “And then,” she notes, “my life as an artist began.” Forman’s design career took off quickly. Noted architect, Ben Thompson, soon hired her to design signage for Faneuil Hall Marketplace and similar “urban marketplaces” in other cities. Only a few years afterwards, she and partner Bob Flack formed their own graphics firm designing signage, interiors, print media, and branding for major corporations around New England. Later, Forman would also serve as Senior Designer for AOL Time Warner. Yet, even as her professional reputation grew, Forman yearned to make images and tell stories of her own: “Throughout my years as a professional designer, as I continued to draw, paint, and photograph, I developed a technique of incorporating these media. It emerged - through mostly late night endeavors when the kids were in bed - as my form of self-expression.” Forman dubbed her collage-like technique, “photographic assemblage.”

The advent of computer technology in commercial graphic art revolutionized not only the design field but Forman’s personal artistic expression, as well. “I first used the computer as a painting tool - crude as it was. Then I was introduced to multi-media, and all elements came together: Painting, drawing, photography, movement. I was in heaven!” she smiles.

Today, Forman feels most at home as an artist when she has a computer mouse in her hand: “I even sketch and draft with a mouse!” Scanners and digital cameras are other now-vital modern accoutrements. Yet, although Forman’s tools of choice have changed over time, one salient constant has remained the same. “I have always started with the human figure,” she states. “My collaged images often begin with the humble tintype portraits of anonymous mid-19th century Americans. Dressed in their finest, posed in the itinerant photographer’s makeshift studio, their desire was to be remembered.” The figures are then arranged within a digitally-fabricated environment - a painstaking, time-intensive process. “The narrative develops from the intersection of the figures and their environs,” Forman notes. “Each image takes many weeks to build and create.” The resulting work has been described by turns as “eerie,” “edgy,” and “enticing.”

“My images hold hidden narratives, incorporating historical imagery with commonplace objects and settings,” Fran Forman explains. In The Playroom, a wry commentary on middle class American childhood, the title is meant to be both literal and ironic. In the spirit of Surrealist Joseph Cornell, known for his box constructions incorporating the technique of “irrational juxtaposition,” Forman has positioned two small, prim girls - one in the foreground, the other in a back corner - within the drab interior of a Spartan nursery. “I was particularly interested in the use of light and shadow in this narrative,” states Forman; and, indeed, the image is awash in shades of brown but for the glorious sun-soaked alpine scene visible through the room’s only window. Light from the window illuminates random details within the room: The brass clasps of a steamer trunk, the laser-yellow petals of a sunflower, the crest feathers of a cockatiel. Stuck indoors within the confines of the playroom’s bare walls (and, no doubt, the confines of adult strictures, too), the children stare straight ahead, their gaze averted from the eminently inviting landscape outside. Clearly, the only “playing” here is that enjoyed between the artist and her viewers.

For the future, Fran Forman sees more transitions ahead. “I see my work becoming more painterly,” she predicts. “I’m hoping to move backward technically, incorporating digital imagery with real brush and paint.” Ultimately, however, the focus of Forman’s art will remain unchanged - the teeming intersection of time, dreams, memory, and human relationships. “I love that everyone who sees my work sees something different, puts his or her own narrative into it,” Forman asserts. “The interpretation is personal, and for me, it’s what is most inspiring about all art.”