When the Veil Falls, the Eyes Still Tell the Story

In the past few months, I produced some portrait work that received much attention from visitors of my blog. It is the portrait of a woman, the lower face covered by a veil, and eyes that tell a story. I received many emails asking who the woman was, and why the veil.

Well, I painted these eyes out of memory or perhaps as a composite of many looks one sees around the Mediterranean basin. The veil was to increase the mystery as much for me as for the viewer! The idea was to describe an aspect of beauty with minimal input upon the canvas.

Over the years I learned that beauty is in attitude, not structure. And I tried to paint an attitude with the slight tilt of the head, the shapes of the veils and the colours of the eyes. I will show the past paintings at the end of this essay, but in all of them this woman has a delightful attitude. At least for me.

… So, I decided to lift the veil. I was not sure how to proceed on this as the veil and the tilted head seemed to determine the attitude. Therefore opted for a straight portrait.

But first, I chose a hare skin that had a lot of texture. When the skin is salted and dried, the veins sometimes become prominent and provide much more creative strategy than when painting on a smooth, plain “canvas”. Here is the hare skin at the start:

I am often asked if I shave the fur to paint. No, I use the inside of the skin and leave the fur intact. Here is the back of the “canvas” which is not seen when I frame the finished work:

Ok, so I always start with the eyes as they determine how the rest of the painting goes. The straight portrait is two-dimensional in perception, but the eyes ended up being inquisitive and playful. It took me some time to decide that a two-dimensional painting of this woman without a veil would be unattractive. So I gave up on painting a full face.

But what to do with those eyes?

Well, it is Halloween soon and I have artifacts all over my work bench. It was an easy decision to just paint the eyes and fill the canvas with what I can find around me.

First, placed the chest feathers of a quail on her forehead en guise of a fancy headpiece. Then placed a deer tooth in the middle of the feathers. Second, constructed a “nose” from the snout of a squirrel and a chin from the ear of the same squirrel. Now I had the perimeter of the face taking shape.

I had an stone arrowhead on my desk that I could not figure out how to use. Now it provided the elongation symmetry with the chin and the vertical dimensions of the head had a pleasant presentation.

I had moth and butterfly wings left over from previous works. I placed them almost as a Mardi Gras mask would have it. After all it is most appropriate for Halloween to wear a mask!

Finally some turquoise stones of various sizes gave this woman’s look the freshness I was looking for.

Did I take the veil away? In some ways yes, although the mischievous look of my previous portraits of

Here are the previous ones starting with a detailed work of beads to construct the transparent veil:

Then the veil got a bit more fluid but less revealing:

And finally I experimented with the use of a butterfly and moth wings:

Will those eyes find their way to my canvas again? Only time can tell.

October 16, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019