Doug Van Es

My work in portraiture is interaction driven. Focusing on the person in mid-motion, I capture the raised eyebrows and waving hands that we all communicate with. My intention is to reinterpret fleeting imagery by hand working it, creating an everlasting object from an image that we are accustomed to seeing swiped away by a finger. Ephemeral moments disappear unless made permanent. My goal is to tap into the tradition of quilts and painted portraits as family heirlooms by creating contemporary portraits from these casual photographs that are snapped by cell phones, often live in the cloud, and usually disappear.