Ellen ORSECK

Revealing & Concealing

When I should have been listening or attending a meeting from elementary school through grad school, I was always observing and sketching the faces of those around me.  Fellow students, instructors, travelers asleep at an airport, participants in a Zoom meeting – they were and continue to be my unwilling subjects.

Beyond capturing the surface of these faces, I am seeking to excavate the interior and reveal what was going on under their likeness.  In this series, I use a combination of oil, acrylic, charcoal and watercolor, in different configurations within each work to embrace a kind of psychic archeology of the features and push towards the psychological core of the subject who is often turned away or partially hidden from my view.

​

The gaze is neither male nor female but more objective, allowing me to uncover the hidden narrative below. Forms dissolve and re-emerge, echoing the instability of identity and the multiplicity of self.

Rather than offering fixed depictions, these portraits propose that identity is felt, not seen—constructed through emotional residue, gestural memory, and the atmospheric tension between bodies. The result is a visual language of vulnerability and revelation, where the act of looking becomes a shared search for what lies beneath the surface.