Fran Forman

Fran Forman studied art and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and then received an MSW, working for several years with heroin addicts. Discovering that she could indeed earn a living in the arts, she entered Boston University’s School of Fine Arts where, specializing in photography and graphic design, she received her MFA. 

She has held a succession of positions in the field of illustration and design: branding, print, and signage for corporate, arts, and retail establishments; CD-roms for books, museum installations, sales and training; book cover illustrations; animations, multimedia, and web designs. Additionally, she was Senior Designer with AOL Time Warner, where she was designer of the preeminent web site devoted to African American culture and where she produced photo illustrations for the daily editorial content.

Between professional life and raising two daughters, Fran continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, and the dislocations of time and place.

Fran is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She is also a recipient of grants from the Sassower, the Tyre, and the Pufflin Foundations, for 2006, 2007. and 2008.

She has won numerous awards and prizes; most recently she won 1st and 2nd place in the Fine Arts sub-category for Px3 Prix de la Photographie (2008 and 2007 respectively); she was a fourth place winner in the Adobe sponsored Photoworkshop.com; and she was a finalist for an Ultimate eye Foundation grant. And at the International Photo Awards 2008, she won 2nd place for Collage and Honorable Mention for Digitally Enhanced.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

Andrea Dezso

I just discovered Andrea Dezso and her fascinating series of works - in tunnel books (paper), strange embroidery, animation, sculpture, drawings, painted journals and sketchbooks. But despite the variation on the medium, there is a wonderful, surrealistic consistency through all her efforts. She creates a new world, not unlike Joseph Cornell, where body parts, girls with moss and mother's sayings from her Transylvania childhood all come into play.

 

Romanian-born Andrea Dezsö, a visual artist and writer, has taught tunnel book workshops at venues including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City and The Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore, MD. For Slash: Paper Under The Knife, Andrea created an installation consisting of 30 one-of-a-kind tunnel books. Examples of Andrea Dezsö's tunnel books and other work can be seen on her website at www.andreadezso.com.

Andrea Dezsö earned her BFA and MAFA in visual communication at the Hungarian University of Design in Budapest. Following a year of teaching at her alma mater, Dezsö moved to New York, where she exhibited her work in galleries and held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design and the City University of New York. In addition ot solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan, She has participated in numerous group exhibitions. Her public art projects are found in Budapest and in the New York subway at the Bedford Park Boulevard-Lehman College Station. Dezsö’s illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Time Magazine, Mc Sweeney’s and others. Currently, she is assistant professor of media design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

Chuck Bowdish

Chuck Bowdish is a prolific Brooklyn artist who has thrived for nearly two decades as a nostalgically classical, yet contemporarily inspired painter. He now works across several mediums including collage (see his American Flag collage to the left)

His paintings of illumined figures juxtaposed with fields of muted color have classical elements from Greek and Roman architecture. His poignant and ephemeral works build upon a diverse history of figurative masters: the corporeality of Massacio, the luminosity of Rembrandt, and the immediacy of Bellows. Bowdish’s own imagery develops from what he describes as the, “logic of dreams.” He is painting the personal as universal; he creates timeless metaphors by exploring themes of innocence, melancholy and sexuality. Bowdish invites us to consider emotive portraits of people who are solely the creation of the artist’s imagination. This visionary painter invokes extraordinarily believable and self-reflective women and children.

When viewing a Bowdish portrait, one pleasantly hovers between the lush reality of the painted surface and the fascinating illusion of bodily solidity—every now and then Bowdish creates a fully realized arm or an entire torso with one confident, intuitive stroke. Sometimes the cheeks and noses of his figures’ softly wrought faces are accentuated with reds, and their semi-translucent bodies are encircled by glowing, protective halos. Overall, the paintings’ subtle tones produce a gentle light. Emanating from within and around each figure, this light warms the abstract fields of color that are central to Bowdish’s compositions. These enigmatic environments are substantive, rather than empty. Whether signifying landscapes, human structures, or the psychic interior, these skillfully worked grounds make Bowdish’s paintings appear consistently grand in scale and sensuous in texture. Painterly abstractions and figurative narratives are generally at odds with one another, but in Bowdish’s work these seemingly divergent artistic practices are successfully unified.

Chuck Bowdish was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1959. His father’s service in the military and Vietnam resulted in a nomadic childhood for Bowdish and his siblings. His mother was a painter and his earliest teacher. While at the Ringling School of Art and Design (Sarasota, Florida) he studied anatomy with one of the Pennsylvania Academy’s most traditional sculptors, Leslie Posey. Bowdish moved to New York City in 1979, and lived in Mexico from 1986 to 1991. He has studied at the Art Students League, the New York Studio School, and most recently at the Graduate School of Figurative Art. In the past, Bowdish supported his enthusiasm for painting by providing illustrations for the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, and by the usual assortment of odd jobs. Now an emerging artist, his most recent solo shows occurred at the Farrell/Pollack Fine Art in Brooklyn, and also the AAA Gallery in New York. Atlanta’s Galerie Timothy Tew has been showing his paintings since 1998. Bowdish’s art is the subject of a recent Peter Wareing documentary film.

Francois Ilnseher

Francois Ilnseher is a painter, collagist and photographer, working in a variety of mediums. His art philosophy is as follows:

About my collages and paintings
The disclaimer at the beginning of a novel reads; this is a purely fictional
Novel, names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors
Imaging any resemblance to actual persons is entirely circumstantial
This declaimer applies to my collages and paintings
I am intentionally avoiding historical, traditional values and past personal
experiences, relying solely on my imagination at the moment of being seduced by the opportunity, the materials and the empty surface, to create a wholly new visual entity.
working mostly with existing elements I assemble same seeking the line, shape or texture
that divide or unite to become the surprise of a
totally new experience, dictated by the given moment.
The similarity and connection one might perceive between the various works
Is the result of a shared moment in time .

Judith Supine

Judith Supine is a New York based street artist whose beautiful, disturbing and political wheatpaste collages enhances downtown Manhattan. While more prolific in the mid-2000's, you can occasionally see some of his work today in DUMBO, Brooklyn (as of last week) and in Chelsea, Manhattan.

His work is very distinctive. Here are some examples:

He is a man of mystery and talent.

Check out a video of his artistic process on this street art blog.