Edinburg based artist Sarah Muirhead (covered here) portrays every day people in her mottled, figurative acrylic paintings. The watercolor-like quality of her art lends to her keen observations of the body and skin tones. Muirhead elaborates on her style choice in her artist statement: “The quality of flesh, its contrasting textures and tensions, the density and potential of muscle and the irregularity and dimples in fatty tissue are important in the way I want to describe any given subject. I want the bodies I paint to be a strange mixture of lurid, glistening attraction and true empathic realism avoiding elegant cliches.” She continues her unique exploration of the figure in “Bonded,” which opens today at Leyden Gallery in London. There is an added intensity to her representation of emotion and spirit in her new paintings, some of her largest to date. Her subjects are bound in different ways, whether physically in rope or hair, or emotionally, represented by colors and dark shadows. Muirhead’s simple compositions put an emphasis on their poses to tell a story – as they dance, bend and contort, she is able to communicate feelings such as pleasure and pain. Take a look at more images from “Bonded” by Sarah Muirhead below.