Facial Architecture

October 29, 2025


The human face, to me, is pure architecture, an edifice built from geometry, rhythm, and form. It possesses a structural logic, a balance of line and proportion that rivals any constructed monument. Beneath the skin lies a framework, a scaffolding of bone and tension that dictates the character of the whole. Painters are drawn to it not only for its beauty but for its engineering, for the way light articulates its planes, for the harmony and dissonance between its angles. Within that ordered structure exists infinite variation, each face a unique construction that speaks to the fragility and resilience of being human.

When I approach the face in paint, I think in terms of building. Each feature is an architectural element, each curve and edge a decision in design. The forehead extends as a plane, the nose a vertical beam, the mouth a subtle hinge where structure meets emotion. The relationships between these forms, how they press, tilt, or align, reveal as much about a person’s psychology as their expression ever could. The power of the face lies in its geometry: a set of lines and angles that carry the emotional weight of a life.

Constructing a face is both an act of precision and surrender. With each stroke, I am engineering presence, establishing weight, proportion, and stability, while allowing the imperfections of form to speak. It’s within the subtle distortions, the tension between order and deviation, that emotion comes forward most clearly. The geometry of the face becomes the language of the soul, translating feeling through structure rather than through likeness.

In painting, I build the face as one might raise a monument: carefully, deliberately, with attention to the forces that hold it together and those that threaten to pull it apart. It is through the scaffolding of form that the psychology of the subject reveals itself, through the angles, the balance, the shifts of symmetry that expose vulnerability or strength. The face is not just seen; it is constructed, its meaning arising from the architecture of its making, line by line, layer by layer, until what remains is not simply resemblance, but revelation.