Every portrait begins with a person, but for me the challenge is not simply to reproduce a likeness. I’m more interested in what happens when you loosen that likeness — allowing colour, gesture and instinct to reveal something beyond the photograph.
Bridie is an acrylic painting on canvas, measuring 85 × 85 cm, and represents a direction I’ve increasingly been exploring in my figurative work: keeping enough of the subject for us to recognise and connect with them, while allowing the painting itself to take over.
Letting colour do the work
Rather than relying on conventional flesh tones, I built Bridie’s face from Mediterranean blues, turquoise, soft yellows, coral and pink. Dark, almost-black marks around the hair and features provide structure, while the lighter passages move much more freely across the face.
I particularly enjoy that tension between control and spontaneity. Some marks describe the person; others exist simply because they belong to the painting.
The eyes remain relatively defined and immediately draw us towards the sitter, while elsewhere edges disappear and colours cross the boundaries we normally associate with a portrait.
A portrait without perfection
I’m not interested in making portraits that feel overly polished or photographic. A photograph can already capture exactly what someone looks like.
Painting gives me the opportunity to do something different.
With Bridie, I wanted the brushstrokes to remain visible and for the surface to retain evidence of how the painting was made. There are areas of detail alongside passages that are much looser and more abstract. From a distance, they come together as a person; closer up, they begin to dissolve into individual shapes, colours and marks.
That balance is becoming increasingly important in my work.
Part of an evolving practice
Living and working on the Costa Brava inevitably influences my palette. The blues and turquoise of the Mediterranean continually find their way into my paintings, even when the subject itself has nothing directly to do with the landscape.
With Bridie, those colours have moved from the landscape into the figure.
Perhaps that is what interests me most about this painting. It isn’t simply a portrait of someone. It is also about my continuing exploration of how much information a painting needs before we recognise a person — and how much can be taken away before that connection disappears.
Bridie
Acrylic on canvas
85 × 85 cm
Martin Zalesny, 2026