Paul Morin

Award winning artist, Paul Morin’s portraits are in public and private collections around the world.  A semi-finalist in the prestigious BP Portrait Award in London, he most recently was chosen to participate in the de Young Open Show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.  Paul’s unique combination of traditional technique with modern sensibility confront the viewer with a sense of scale that is very individual.  With empathy and humor, Paul’s work celebrates the human spirit and captures the unique look and expression of each sitter.

This current body of work in oil and silver metal leaf attempts to find a language that is both ancient and modern – a portraiture for the 21st century.  Religious icon? Re-imagined tintype? An evocation of the “Silver Screen?”  These are images both vintage and contemporary with backgrounds that glow like a light that could be sacred and otherworldly or secular and garish.

“I believe a portrait, at its best, is a conversation.  Filled with contradictions, unknowable truths and infinite subtleties it exists as a dialogue between sitter and artist and, through the artist, between sitter and viewer.  It is an unfolding process in which an artist can honor, exalt and fix forever a moment and a life of a human being.”