I paint hidden and forgotten truths from family stories and history. Portraying individuals who have emerged from hidden historical episodes and forgotten family stories fascinates me. The subjects in my paintings are trapped by circumstances beyond their control or their inability to extract themselves from the entrapment they created.
My paintings are a psycho-analysis of my subject’s dilemma and narrate the emotional reality of their challenges. Success, for me, is transmitting those feelings in paint to draw the viewer into the defining moment. I am, as art writer Don Wilkinson described, “Fortier, not long ago an abstractionist who painted “about nothing”, has become an unabashed chronicler of unimaginable tragedies.”
