MTC ART GALLERY

The MTC community art program presents:

Landscapes Real and Imagined

Paintings by Michael Fram

Artist's Statement:
During the 1980s and into the 1990s, my painting reflected an interest in the subjects of relationships and the family in domestic interiors. These works were shown locally in group shows and in solo exhibits at the Oakland Museum Collectors Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Rental Gallery at Fort Mason, and at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s hallway galleries.

In 1999 I began to spend some of my time working outdoors directly from nature. As sketches and small canvases began to accumulate, larger scaled work, executed in the studio, began to emerge from these studies. I’ve been fascinated by the natural world and have sketched from nature from an early age. In my current paintings, it is the blend of direct observation and memory, with imagination, that motivates me.

The paintings in the current ABAG show have been done over the past ten years. Most were made either directly from my point of view outdoors with my portable easel or in my studio from sketches in various media, some with the help of reference photos I took. A few paintings in the show were created in my studio from my imagination, based on memory and the experience of life by the San Francisco Bay.

My primary painting focus over the past fifty years has been pictures with various amounts of space. It has been interesting to me to be able to paint people in interiors or views of outside environments either fairly close by or miles into the distance painted by hand on a stretched canvas much smaller than the environment shown.
— Michael Fram, November 2010