Quirky, ambiguous figures inhabit Fran Shalom’s paintings. Their bright, cartoony colors and buoyant forms fill each composition with playful energy. She thinks of them as, “...ambiguous characters who inhabit my studio keeping me company and often engaging in silent conversation.”
Shalom gravitates to simple shapes and hard edges but builds depth through textured surfaces. Painting improvisationally, she adds and subtracts - building, wiping, scraping, and reshaping. This revealing and covering creates layered imagery. In many works, fields of rich color are interrupted by traces of past hues and ghosts of earlier forms.
