Dark Portraits By Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin is a Dutch artist living and working in Leiden. He composes powerful human portraits that challenge our perception of beauty. His paintings depict representations of distorted faces that have an unsettling expression. It looks like the portraits were deliberately damaged with brushstrokes after the painting was completed.

Although Daniel’s characters feature deformed and even destroyed faces, they remain quite fascinating and once you see the painting, you want to know the story behind it.

Daniel’s art is inspired by the imperfection of beauty. In an interview, he stated: ‘I have always been more interested in imperfection or deformation rather than something that looks ‘normal’. I see beauty in the abnormality of an organism or object because it becomes something we don’t see each day.[…] That way of our perception of beauty is something I am interested in.’

See below a selection of Daniel’s dark portraits and discover more on his website.