It’s not that they’re faceless; they simply don’t have faces.They are at once Everywoman and perhaps no one you’ve met. Sometimes they might be you.
Although Francis Padilla works, most often, from a live model he is rarely painting her. To give her a face might narrow her audience, might exclude from her viewers that one woman who might have connected with the shape, the form, the gesture, or the emotion so clearly conveyed and often so deeply felt by her viewers. All of this in the absence of facial expression. Padilla paints figures, women mostly with the kind of abstracted realism most would consider expressionism.
Dedicated to conveying the various nuances of his subjects, he eliminates her facial features and works with the figures through a kind of expressionism reminiscent of early Nathan Olivera, one of the Bay Area’s best-known painters and printmakers, using substance and form to gesture his way to her essence.
