Lucy Pass’ portraits are meant to be incomplete. Featuring little to no background, her subjects look as though they’re floating in time and space. At times they look out of focus, and in some cases, whole chunks of them seem to be missing.
Such is the case in a recent series of paintings, where Pass focused on the human gaze, painting miniature portraits depicting only one eye at a time. Her portraits were then places in tiny golden boxes – a technique she borrowed from Georgian lover’s eye portraits.
“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,” wrote the UK-based portrait artist on 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,” she went on to explain. “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.”
Prepare to be moved:
