project spotlight on:

Artist, FRAN SHALOM

 "Fran Shalom, who has been exhibiting since the late 1980s, makes modest-sized abstract paintings full of idiosyncratic decision making and irreverent playfulness. Her practice is wedded to improvisation, she uses no preset palette, does no preliminary research, and no prior sketches or studies inform her paintings. She begins by laying down a color or shape and the rest is a call and response. Yet, the artist operates within a tight vocabulary as dirty, saturated color frequently describes large circular forms resembling heads, screens, 

and totems pulsating with linear clarity and Pop-inflected drama.

Shalom completed her MFA at the Art Institute in San Francisco as a photographer, and for years lugged around a Hasselblad, which has a 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ frame. Naturally, the artist fell in love with the square. When she shifted to painting, there was a built in familiarity with the square format, and all of its attendant baggage. Shalom is a self-described Modernist painter. She is not, however, interested in the concerns of Non-Objective abstraction, but instead leans into referentiality. The artist has also long maintained a Zen Buddhist practice, which places considerable emphasis on change, flexibility, direct experience and rejects a fixed approach to things; qualities readily apparent in her paintings. J.J. Murphy has previously written about the formal relationship between the late Thomas Nozkowski and Fran Shalom, as they both share a penchant for modest easel-sized work and cartoon-like formal invention..."

ESSAY, Jason stopa 

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