Pop culture is filled with iconic characters, but how many can you identify just from their eyes? It’s a question posted by painter Jason Edmiston in his latest gallery exhibit, Eyes Without a Face 2.
All Images: Jason Edmiston/Mondo
Edmiston’s show features paintings of only a character’s eyes in a 1:1 scale. So if it’s a human, that’s how big the painting is. If it’s a dinosaur, it’s bigger. A toy? Much smaller. He originated the idea at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, Texas in 2016, and revisited it this week at the same place. The resulting exhibit is a jaw-dropping collection of work with paintings ranging from incredibly small (Pickle Rick) to enormously huge (the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man). Here are just a few of our favourite selections. Can you guess them all?
Not pictured above is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man piece — which is 6.71m wide by eight feet high. A photo can’t do it justice, so check out this time lapse video.
And this image, for scale.
The person in both the video and photo is, of course, artist Jason Edmiston.
The show has 95 total paintings in it – so what you see above is just the tip of the iceberg. They’re on display through February 17 at the gallery. However, almost every single painting is already sold out.
How can that be? I can tell you first-hand: I flew into Austin and waited 56 hours to get into this gallery, besting even my most recent 31 hour story. Outside of the long hours and cold temperatures, the experience ended up being quite awesome. I hung with old friends, met new ones, ate good food, drank a lot of beer, and found myself in a ton of really awesome situations and conversations. Then, in the end, I ended up with four pieces: The eyes from The Lost Boys and the eyes from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as well as the preliminary pencils from both Spaceballs pieces. Why would I subject myself to this? Well, because of what I said above. Everything in the show is an original painting, so the only way to get one was to line up early. Then, even 56 hours early, I was already 12th in line. A few pieces remain as of writing and you can see those, and the full show, at this link.
Oh, and here’s whose peepers are in each of those paintings:
Dave from 2001, Jareth from Labyrinth, Pickle Rick from Rick & Morty, David from The Lost Boys, Barf from Spaceballs, Tyrion from Game of Thrones, Morpheus from The Matrix, Doug Quaid in disguise from Total Recall, Homemade Spider-Man from Spider-Man: Homecoming, T-Rex from Jurassic Park, Michael Myers in a sheet from Halloween, Adam West Batman, Star Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy, MacReady from The Thing, Frankenstein, Black Panther, Pennywise from It, and Dark Helmet from Spaceballs.