Flight, oil, gold leaf, and acrylic paint on wood panel

Adele Knowler is an artist based in Alberta who uses oil painting and mixed media techniques to create eerie portraits of youthful subjects. Adele’s figures, in recent works, are depicted in partial abstraction, with the finished images giving the viewer an impression of a face rather than every detail.

Benjamin Clementine 1, oil and gold leaf on wood panel

I’m interested in the way Adele’s recent portraits seem to bleed onto the canvas, becoming more distorted the long the viewer spends looking at them. Adele’s works also favor a heavy contrast between her subjects’ faces, and their hair, and backgrounds. Often, figures are imagined with pale skin and delicate features but dark, undefined masses of hair, which serves to further enforce the ghostly aspects of their appearance.

Adele's gallery of work from 2016-17

These works also speaks to a technically interesting method of dragging oil paint, as well as mixed media such as gold leaf across canvas. I wonder if the artist begins with a more detailed, polished looking image and then purposefully obscures it. In other galleries, such as her Humans and Water series, the artist embraces a very polished mode of figurative painting. 

The Road Less Taken, oil on canvas