Four portraits. Isle of Man, 2026.
Every person who has ever lived was an entire other consciousness. A complete interior life, a specific way of being in the world, gone when they died. What remains are records: writing, if they wrote; voice, if someone recorded it; objects, if they made them. Each form of record preserves something real. None of them preserves the soul.
I am painting people I never met, from historical references, photographs, written descriptions. What I am doing with those sources is not copying them. It is making hundreds of small decisions about what to include, what to invent, what to leave out, until something comes through that feels true to the person rather than just accurate to the source. When it works, it isn’t because the likeness is correct. It’s because the expression has a quality of just being, rather than being observed.
None of them are remembered by their faces. These paintings do not claim to preserve these people better than other records. They claim only to preserve the specific thing the other records cannot. The sense, however inexplicable, that another consciousness once inhabited a face. Portraiture is the only form of preservation that allows a later consciousness to meet an earlier one. That is what this series is for.
Sophia Morrison
1859–1917
Folklorist and collector. She gathered the songs and stories of the island at the moment they were closest to disappearing.
Oil on canvas · 16 × 20 in · 2026
Mona Douglas
1898–1987
Poet and song collector. She continued what Morrison began and added her own voice to it.
Oil on canvas · 16 × 20 in · 2026
Frank Matcham
1862–1920
Theatre architect. He designed over two hundred buildings across Britain, including the island’s own Gaiety Theatre, from drawings of obsessive precision.
Oil on canvas · 20 × 24 in · 2026 · In progress
Hall Caine
1853–1931
Novelist. For a decade the most widely-read British writer alive. Now almost entirely forgotten.
Oil on canvas · 16 × 20 in · 2026 · Forthcoming
For enquiries write to olivia@volaraes.co.uk