Dana Brotman has spent her artistic career conveying the power the face evokes. The face for her is a landscape of feeling, memory, and desire. She presents the face in archetypal poses and positions, recalling the agelessness of religious icons and idols and the still beauty of daguerreotype portraiture. Her subjects come to her from a magazine photo, a person seen across the room, and, inevitably, from memory and the ineffable sensations that filter through the seams of daily life.
The subjects of her paintings are at once both distracted, and yet completely engaged in some kind of wandering through memory and daydream, or absorbed in a kind of worry and longing. The gaze she portrays is both one of a far away look as well as one of looking inward. It is the tension between the looking out and looking in that preoccupies her.