Note:
I make narrative paintings and portraits.
This exhibition will contain portraits and these notes pertain
to them.
Most of my portraits are initiated
by a feeling toward a situation at whose center is a person I know
well. The bonds of affection are present. Perhaps, however, these
portraits are a witness as much to how little it is possible to
know one another as they are about how much.
The portrait session is a form of
intimate experience, in some ways a ceremony. The painter-model
collaboration is a very old ritual and I enjoy its basic nature,
containing as it does the model’s generosity and conscious
willingness to be observed.
I want the people in my painting to
have an emotional aliveness similar to the one I observe in real
life.
Because my work involves feelings,
I question where the boundary lies between feeling and sentimentality.
The art’s making is an attempt
to prioritize the succession of painted marks that record observation
and to fashion them as efficiently as possible.
The painted person corresponds to
the real person, but the painting is in itself a discreet object.
The painted ofject has no meaning. It has presence.
Frank Born
