The Facescapes" the painting project, started in 2024, is a portrait series using the oil painting technique. The faces of those portrayed are not fully depicted; emotions and mood are conveyed through details, in particular eyes, lips and some other parts of the human head. Focusing on the eyes and lips creates a sense of intimacy and brings the viewer closer to the emotions of the subject being portrayed. The human face, a tapestry of intricate features, serves as a powerful communication tool, conveying a variety of emotions through its subtle expressions. Among these features, eyes and lips occupy a unique place. Do they establish eye contact with the viewer, invite him to communicate, or challenge him? Perhaps they are looking beyond the frame, drawing the viewer's attention to something unseen or intended. Eyes can serve as windows into life experience and have symbolic meaning in art. This series of works is a kind of sensory navigation through the landscapes of eyes and lips, which when viewed together, form a dynamic landscape of emotional expression. Their interaction, their harmony or dissonance, can reveal the complexity of human emotions and the nuances of interpersonal interaction.
Maryna Shkoliar is a Ukrainian artist based in Ukraine. Her Facescapes focus on isolated facial details – an eye, a mouth, a glance – distilled into small circular paintings. Working with oil and acrylic, she uses soft shifts of tone, fluid brushwork and areas of...
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We don’t currently have a gallery space where you can view the work in person, though depending on where you’re based, a studio visit can sometimes be arranged. What we’ve found, overwhelmingly, over twenty-two years: when someone falls for a piece on screen, the real thing is more, not less. Colour, surface, scale, presence. It works that way around. It’s why, across two decades, our returns have been minuscule.
But rest assured: if it isn’t right when it arrives, it can be returned within fourteen days.
