One of the five pillars
The women in Painted Idols
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The subjects
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The paintings form a series called Painted Idols. The subjects are women who are looked at for three seconds at a time, thousands of times a day. The photographs are found online, saved, and one of them gets painted months later. Every painting carries her first name and credits the source photograph.
That is the whole method, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is the question people are too polite to ask. These are not anonymous nudes and they are not invented figures. They are twenty-three paintings of fourteen named women, made from images those women published themselves.
Every one of those photographs was made to be scrolled past. It gets three seconds, if that, and then it is gone. A canvas takes weeks and then hangs on a wall for years. That reversal is the series: an image built to be forgotten, made into something you have to live with.
Painted more than once
- Riae — Orange Van · Blue Hair · Bathing in Red · Mobile Phone — and what only became visible once all four stood side by side.
- Kayleigh — Tattoos · Smile · Green Straps · Girls, with Emily
- Lindsey — White Blouse · The Mirror
- Deelee — Golden Girl · Black Straps
- Natalee — White Top · Blue Light
Painted once
- Dana (Black Bikini)
- Kindly (On Gold)
- Dakota (Pink Bikini)
- Marisol (Bubblegum)
- Veronika (American Girl)
- Dailey (Illustrated)
- Pandora (Dreaming in Blue)
- Elisa (Appetite)
The series as a whole
- All the paintings in Painted Idols — the full collection.
- How the work is made — from a found photograph to a finished canvas.
- About the painter
Questions people ask
Who are the women in the paintings?
They are women who are looked at for three seconds at a time — photographed for attention, and scrolled past by nearly everyone who sees them. Each painting carries her first name and credits the source photograph. Fourteen women appear across the twenty-three canvases in the series.
Are the paintings made from photographs?
Yes. The photographs are found online, saved, and one of them is painted months later. The gap matters: what survives months of sitting in a folder is usually not the most explicit image but the one that keeps being interesting.
Why is the series called Painted Idols?
An idol is something people look at. These images were made to be looked at once and then forgotten. Painting one does the opposite: weeks of work on a single photograph, so it can be looked at for years instead of seconds. It starts with saving — the image is kept, set aside, not scrolled past. The painting comes much later, and only for a few of them.
Do the women know about the paintings?
I write to them. Every woman whose photograph has become a painting is sent a message about it. Some wrote back, and the ones who did were warm about it. Others never replied — these are accounts with very large followings, where one message from a painter does not stand out — so what I can tell you is that I tried, not that she knows. And writing to someone is not the same as asking them: none of it is offered here as consent.
Buying one of these is the easy part. It is the wall that takes the decision, because everyone who walks in will see it and form an opinion about you. That is the real transaction, and it is not one I can make for you.