Fran Shalom has exhibited widely throughout the United States, including the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge Mass, and the Newark Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rose Art Museum and the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. She has been the recipient of a Pollack Krasner Artist Grant, New Jersey Arts Artist Grant, a MacDowell Colony Artist Fellowship and an Art Omi Residency. She will be having a solo exhibition this fall at the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, NJ. She is represented by the Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York City

Question:

Your work would mostly be considered abstract but in some paintings there is an obvious reference to a face. Many artists are interested in pareidolia, the tendency to see recognizable things or beings in random patterns – in clouds or the man in the moon, for instance. For you, the appearance of a face in some paintings is not random.  Your emphasis is different somehow. You display the facial features so obviously. Yet they are in tandem with abstract compositions. What moves you to obscure the facial reference at some moments and allow them in others?

Answer:

As a painter, I am always teetering from one edge of a dialectic to the other: from abstraction to figuration (like so many artists); from ambiguity to obviousness; from clarity to mystery; from additive to subtractive. The initial painting is approached intuitively but I am also very careful and deliberate in the specificity of the shape, its edges and where the shape sits on the canvas.

Doppelganger, 2021, 24×24 inches, oil on canvas

The shape/shapes often have a head-like familiarity – that sense of pareidolia to which you refer. But I am always questioning this notion: how much of a suggested mouth or ear shape can I get away with without it feeling too specific. I prefer to have a mouth shape that is just a bit dislocated or misshapen. It’s like the notion of duck/rabbit- open to interpretation, having it hover a bit between what it is and what it isn’t.

Go Between, 24×24 inches, 2021, oil on wood

I like to play with that edge of familiarity and ambiguity so that the painting ends up surprising and amusing me. It is all improvisation right up to the end, which is nerve-racking but fun. Otherwise, it ends up feeling pre-determined which doesn’t work for me.

I want to be as surprised as someone who is seeing the painting for the first time and even the second time… I feel like I am always on a bit of a tight-rope trying to balance the known and the unknown – but it’s what keeps it interesting for me. The surprise is always a big part of the delight.

Lookout, 36x36inches, 2021, oil on canvas