EMPATH
A series of portraits built from accumulated pattern, shape, and ornament
Each portrait is the cumulative emotional record of a single contemporary subject, rendered as one collaged surface
The series asks what a portrait can hold when emotion arrives through line, geometry, and decoration rather than through anatomy
Man laughing
Size 30m x 40cm
Acrylic on Wooden Board
The subject's smile is built from accumulated geometric construction : triangles, dots, woven patterns, chequered fields assemble the cheekbones, the mouth, the bridge of the nose, the soft creases at the corners of the eyes. Behind the figure, the same patterned vocabulary continues outward: a layered field of decorative fragments in cobalt, gold, and black, the visual world that has produced this particular moment of feeling.
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The painting holds a genuine paradox. A laugh is the most natural human movement — instantaneous, involuntary, biological. Here it is rendered as something the opposite: deliberate, composed, constructed slowly from hundreds of geometric decisions over weeks of mark-making. The slow accumulation produces an image of the instant. The constructed face carries the truth of an unconstructed feeling
Anfisa
Size 30cm x 30cm
Acrylic on Wood Board
Crius
Size 40cm x 40cm
Acrylic on Canvas Board
Indra
Size 30cm x 30cm
Acrylic on Canvas
Selena
Size 30cm x 30cm
Acrylic on Canvas
Myka
Size 30cm x 30cm
Acrylic on Canvas
Evelynne
Size 30cm x 40cm
Acrylic on Canvas
Personal Reflection
I started this series with the idea that emotion does not need skin to reach a viewer. I wanted to see if line and shape, used carefully, could carry as much feeling as a realistically rendered face. I was trained classically, but I chose to step away from that and use layered shapes instead.
Each portrait in Empath is built from many small decisions. A triangle here, a pattern of dots there, a fragment of gold leaf along the brow. None of it is realistic; all of it is intentional. When I look at a finished painting from the series, I see the face not as a likeness, but as the sum of every shape that went into it.
The series is also a quiet argument about identity. I do not believe a person is one fixed thing. We try Asian food one day and a burger the next; we learn from a Greek border on a building, a textile from a random shop in on a summer trip, a symbol on a phone screen. We are an accumulation of places, tastes, languages, images, and patterns.
My portraits try to render this directly: a face built from everything the person has carried with them, gathered onto a single surface.
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