Eileen Doman

Except for coloring hair and painting fingernails at a Genoa, Illinois beauty salon where she had been employed, Eileen Doman had never shown much of a predeliction for art. In the early 1990s, though, when she was nearing 40, she decided to try painting. Her life was to be quickly and radically transformed.

By 1992, after her work was given exposure at the New York Outsider Art Fair, she was hailed as a major discovery. And just two years later she was given a solo show at New York's vaunted Ricco-Maresca Gallery. The New Yorker weighed in on the production this way: "The remarkable portraits...have the idiosyncrasy of Modigliani: slightly off center, angular, distorted, yet always true to their subject... By turns humorous and poignant, the paintings have the perspective of people caught by the camera, but transformed by the brush...." Not long after, the beautician-turned-painter was the subject of a story on Connie Chung's "Face to Face." Perhaps the high point of Doman's new career came in 2001 when the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired one of her paintings.

The people of Eileen Doman's paintings are relatives and family friends, stopped in time, forty, fifty and more years ago. Most of the paintings spring from old family photographs. Doman has a collection of hundreds of such pictures: artlessly observed depictions of her lated and beloved grandmother, Ida Bell, of rural Kentucky; her mother, Lillian, at 16 already married and a mother; snapshots of uncles posed with shiny cars that belonged to others. Many of these people are gone now; those who are still alive bear little today to the souls inhabiting the canvases. Time is wind. Its passage leaves nothing the same.