Artist focus: Elly Smallwood
Elly Smallwood is a contemporary artist living and working in Toronto, Canada, who focuses on expressive portraits.
In her portraits, Smallwood explores the distortion of the face through movement and expression by abstracting the form through messy brush strokes and sometimes even layering multiple images/sketches over the top of one another, as can be seen in her 2013 piece, Time (located on the right of gallery image).
Smallwood uses oils thickly, in bold, messy strokes and then works on top of this layer with a thinner brush/charcoal to achieve more detail in the features of the faces. Her works have am almost unfinished quality about them, for example in Alistair, where you can identify areas of the canvas that are empty and unpainted, and even the grid used for proportions when sketching the face.
Colour is also a very important aspect in her paintings. For example, in On Skin, bright, vibrant reds cover almost the entirety of the face which, along the the considerable size of the canvas, immediately catches the eye of the viewer. The strokes of red also give the illusion of bleeding or burnt skin, making the painting instantly shocking, even gruesome. In contrast to the crimson face, the eyes are a pale, piercing blue whose gaze seems to look directly at the viewer, and the absence of a dark pupil or the whites of the eyes dehumanize the figure further.
In one of her smaller sketches, Study of a Girl, Smallwood again uses colour carefully, this time in a very obvious separation of the girl's right eye from the rest of her face through the use of mixed media, meaning that the viewer's attention is automatically directed towards the monochrome area of the portrait. The effect of this is that it leaves one wondering where/to whom the girl's gaze is directed.
Alistair (2014)
On Skin (2012) Study of a Girl
Visit Elly Smallwood's website here.