Poppy Ellis is a contemporary British artist based on the Kent coast.

 

Her portraits are built from fragments, a tilt of the head caught on a train, the set of someone’s shoulders in a café window, a stranger’s expression held for only a moment. These glimpses of real people become the starting point for characters who exist nowhere but on the canvas.

 

A colourist at heart, Ellis breaks the face into planes of colour. Features sometimes sit slightly off-centre, shifting between two angles at once, while patterned grounds press up close behind the figure, flattening the space between subject and background. The effect draws you in, holding your gaze rather than letting it settle.

 

The likenesses are invented, but the observation behind them is real, drawn from years of watching how people hold themselves in the world, resulting in a cast of imagined sitters who feel oddly familiar, as though you have met them before without quite remembering where.