How to look at a portrait whose face won't resolve

Most portraits give you the face first and let you wander from there. JoCa's paintings do the opposite. The face is the one thing you're not going to get, and everything around it is painted with complete attention.

That can feel like a trick the first time. It isn't. It's a way of making you look harder. Here are five ways into it, using four works on this site.

1. Find what survives

Start with what the painting leaves alone. In Ghastlighting (1) the blur takes the eyes and the brow, and nothing else. The nose, the parted lips, the ear and the long line of the throat are painted smooth and exact, in the finish you'd expect from a traditional portrait. Light falls across the neck from the left.

That's the first thing to notice across the whole body of work: the mouth almost always survives. It does in Ghastlighting, in Sense (1), in Overwhelmed (1), and through most of The Dreamer. You're given someone who can speak but not look back at you.

2. Read the covering as paint, not as damage

In Sense (1) the face is covered by slabs of cream and flesh-coloured paint, laid on with a knife or a loaded brush so thickly that the edges curl and cast their own small shadows. Underneath, the lips, chin and neck are soft and blended. The two ways of painting sit on the same canvas and never mix.

That covering is the most physical thing in the room, not a gap in the picture. On a canvas a metre across, it stands off the surface enough that it changes as you walk past it.

3. Follow the direction of the interruption

Every interruption moves somewhere. In Ghastlighting it drags sideways, like a head turned too fast for a camera. In Overwhelmed (1) the face tips up, and a band of red and yellow sweeps across the eyes and out into a huge billowing mass of pink and white. It could be a cloud, a petal or a thought that got too big.

The title does the rest. Read the direction of the paint and you're reading what's happening to the person: pushed, swept, swallowed or turning away.

4. When there's no face at all

Cyber-Pinocchio goes all the way. There's no face to obscure. The head is a set of concentric rings, the shoulders are built from horizontal lines, and the whole figure sits inside frames nested within frames. It reads like a signal, or a fingerprint.

The title is a clue. Pinocchio is the puppet that wants to become a real person. Here the figure is all pattern and no person, which is the other end of the same question the smeared and blurred portraits are asking.

5. Stand back, then step in

These paintings work at two distances, and a phone screen shows you neither.

From across a room you see the figure: a person, a pose, a mood. Up close, the figure disappears into what the paint is doing. Ridges of impasto, the drag of a dry brush, the exact edge where a smooth passage meets a rough one. Nuclear Seed, at 150 × 150 cm, is life-size. Ghastlighting (1) is half a metre and meant to be looked at from arm's length. Size matters as much as the image.

What you're left with

JoCa describes the method as non finito: deliberately unfinished. It's an old idea. Renaissance sculptors sometimes left figures half-emerged from the block. Here it's pointed at the one part of a portrait we assume is non-negotiable.

Take the face away and the rest of the person gets louder: the mouth, the throat, the tilt of the head, the weather moving through it. The paintings aren't hiding someone. They're asking how much of a person you need to see before you recognise them.

Browse the original works, read about Echoes of Haworth, or use the contact page to ask about a specific painting.