dana brotman

About the Artist

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. 

Brotman has been a member of Touchstone Gallery for seven years. Her work has been shown in the DC and Baltimore metropolitan areas, was used as the centerpiece for a modern music performance by Fuse Ensemble at Atlas Performing Arts Center as well as for the cover of composer Gina Biver's first album. In addition to her work as a painter and photographer, she practices clinical psychology in Falls Church, Virginia.

For more information about the artist, visit danabrotmanartist.com. Recent exhibitions at Touchstone Gallery include: unleaving (October 2023), Pillow Book: pages from a pandemic (2021), Transitional Spaces (2020), and beg borrow + steal: works on cardboard (2017).