Dominique Fortin

I came across Dominique Fortin and was immediately mesmerized. She predominately uses oil paint, but also some other mixed media to create layers in her work. She wants to portray life, death, birth, the metamorphosis of life. She creates these dreamy, fantasized images, incorporating butterflies, birds, and her daughter in most pieces. She uses her daughter in her work because she says it's like an expression of her as a child, since they look so much alike. Yet unlike a typical child portrait, happy and smiling, she creates this intense stare. As she says in her artist statement, "their strange fixedness asks us 'do you know who you are? Where are you going? Why are you here?'"  Her work is actually a lot more haunting then what may appear at first, and I am just completely drawn in.

By Corinne Atamaniuk