These portraits of anonymous individuals have been an ongoing series throughout my art practice which explores the anonymity of identity through portraiture and found images. I paint anonymous photographic portraits and mask these individuals through the painting process. Although the works have been painted realistically, each subject is often covered or painted in a vivid, alien-green colour which reference both the stereotype of the alien figure and our psychological other. The subjects have also been presented with doppelganger-features, for instance in some of these portraits, the same eyes have been used on multiple faces. Often, we see portraiture as a way of telling us something meaningful and truthful about the sitter, but these works challenge the inauthenticity of a portrait as a representation of identity.

“The imposture” is a term that I adopted from Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida. He thought that we all “suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture” in front of the camera. There is a desire for authenticity of our self-image, whilst subjecting to the camera’s gaze in a ritual of posing. The result of this is a “dispersed self”, the imposture. We are constantly “imitating” ourselves or others, and because of this, the authentic self may not be possible in a photograph, no one “is ever anything but the copy of a copy.” My portraits uncover this dispersed self, our psychological other.

oil painting on board.

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