Portraits Catalog

Artist's Note

This is an exhibition of which I am very proud because it turned out to be a very personal selection of my portraits from the past twenty years. How I came to paint them is tied up with my relationships to the people portrayed. Here, for instance, are my two best children friends, brothers. I painted the oldest, Jacob, when he was 16 months old-why?- as a gift to his parents-as a way to attempt to capture him at this tender age. He sat for me, all alone, in an adult chair, dressed in his overalls. We took a break and I carried him on my shoulders around the yard. Back to sitting, he stayed in the pose until tears came; this willingness to concentrate remains one of his strengths. When his brother was born, I waited until the same age and painted him too, then again when each was eight and several times in between and since. Those portraits are in this show. There is my brother, who asked what I wanted to do on one of my birthdays-"paint your portrait". There is my father on the last day of his life. There are commissions, several marking special occasions, one a 50th birthday. The portrait session is a unique opportunity to spend private time with a person, to know them a bit better. Old friendships deepen and new ones are made. A sitting is a gift to me and to the art gods. We work together to make something that remains after we have gone.

I have been making portraits since I was a child. Even then I think I was interested in human psychology. I have always felt that by looking at a face and painting what I saw, I could capture a portion of the interior life we each posses. Perhaps my subject is actually my own psychology and the portrait is a metaphor for this. Or perhaps it is a metaphor for all we cannot know about each other. Perhaps my subject is also awareness itself. The life force is present in us and common to us all. By creating a very minimized situation---one sitter, one observer, a little quiet time--I hope to isolate and capture that quality of being alive.

I can only attempt it by attending to the formal properties I can observe: line, shape, value, texture. The painting is a collection of many sequential observations. The time depicted in the final image is not a snapshot of a moment. It is a mysterious time and time is a hidden subject of the painting.

Frank Born
San Francisco

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[ Essay by Jean Mach ]

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