Artist Elspeth Vince finds endless inspiration within the human body and mind

Capturing your milieu can be tricky, even more so in today’s fragmented generation. Elspeth Vince, however, makes it look easy. Her large figurative oil paintings are moody, oscillating between the use of light and colour (or sometimes both) to portray the different ways a simple scene can quickly become uneasy. “I am quite an emotional person and a very deep thinker, so my paintings feature objects and poses that reflect how I feel at that time,” Elspeth tells It’s Nice That on her craft. Moral nihilism, self-deception and the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ are just some of the themes Elspeth’s work covers. “I generally make the work to feel quietly reflective, brooding, to speak of silence as opposed to sound and to feel like the shadows in a corner of a room,” she explains.

It’s clear to see how human behaviour and psychology directly influences Elspeth’s paintings, but the well of inspiration from human conditions doesn’t just stop there. “I also find human bodies to be a large inspiration and movement of them, how the light bounces off them and my own included, paying attention to how certain things feel is very important to communicating a mood,” Elspeth says. With such a close eye for detail, it’s no wonder Elspeth’s work is continuing to grasp more attention in the contemporary painting scene.