The portraits of artist Austin Power have a sort of ghostly sensibility about them – almost as if they weren’t images of people but of hazy memories. His watercolor paintings are depictions of people’s faces at varying levels of detail. Some facial features may be nearly photo-realistic while others are little more than subtle stains on the paper. His subjects seem to be fading in and out of focus. Really, Power’s process and style is a metaphor for his and our own wider relationship with others. Power says in his statement, “I am interested in showing the difficulty and discomfort in fully understanding a person.” His ‘partial’ portraits in a way reflect our fundamentally partial understanding of others.
