Melissa Forman spends her days working as a commercial artist and her nights creating a richly visual world filled with characters created from an opulent, mysterious, and often eerie imagination. Her lovely, idealized figures seem lost in their own worlds, drifting between the 19th and 21st centuries. Created from a mix of appropriated imagery from the late Victorian era and modern photographs from her personal collection, her portraits draw from obvious traditions in the genre but take on a life of their own. Her figures are strangely perfect and almost frozen in their expressions and poses. They evoke a Victorian sense of etiquette and grace while reaching outside of their image to provide a window into something deeper and far more human. While these mysterious, and sometimes withdrawn, figures were created from photos of friends and family of the artist, they are not meant to represent themselvesrather, they portray emotional states and aspects of the human psyche. Melissa has carefully calculated each one by changing colors and manipulating features to evoke a mysterious and sentimental mood. Alienated from their real world and time, these images become metaphors for emotional and psychological states. They exist as a product of Melissas pursuit to create beauty and recognize the elegance and sincerity of genuine human emotion.

www.melissaformanstudio.com