They say the eyes are a window to the soul, but what if those eyes are painted on canvas? UK-based portrait artist Lucy Pass explores the uncanny ways in which a portrait can stare you back. Focused mainly on the eyes, her works feature little to no background; her subjects – detached.
Working in a range of styles, from loose pencil sketches to more tightly rendered oil paintings, her paintings are sometimes embellished with gold leaf that adds a religious air to the finished product. Such is a recent series of miniature paintings by Pass, focused entirely on eyes. Based on Georgian lover’s eye portraits, the miniature paintings are placed inside tiny golden boxes.
“If the intent of portraiture is to capture the subject in their truest sense, I am then a kind of anti-portrait maker, passing my own subconscious judgment on an unknown face and inviting the viewer to then do the same when faced with the finished piece,” Pass explains in her website.
“I have become fascinated by the range of responses to each face – what one person sees can be in complete contradiction to what the next sees. Sometimes these reactions can be clearly explained by the individual and other times it is something visceral that can’t be placed. The piece is then no longer about the face looking back at us, but about the feelings that it stirs and what those feelings say about us.”
