I make very small things.

I’m a miniature oil painter based in Melbourne, and for many years I’ve been painting eyes. Small, sometimes smaller than a fingernail, on found and vintage objects. A tin, a spoon, a vessel, a coin, a heart that sits in the palm of a hand. I work in the tradition of the Georgian Lover’s Eye, those tiny portraits once painted so that someone could carry a loved one’s gaze close to them, something seen, and something kept.

I’m drawn to the eye as both subject and self, to the way a single eye can hold a whole person, watching and being watched at once. Each piece asks you to slow down and look closely, the way I have to in the making of it.

Much of my work begins with an object that already carries a history, a worn tin with its old printed directions still inside, a piece of blue and white china, a coin softened by handling. I paint into these, letting the object’s past and the painted gaze sit together. My current project, THE SEEN, gathers around a hundred anonymous eyes, painted on objects sent to me by people all over the world and numbered rather than named, a collective portrait built entirely through looking.

Alongside the eyes, my practice extends into trompe l’oeil, jewellery collaborations, and small painted worlds, but it’s the eye I keep returning to, as subject, as self, as a way of looking closely at the world.

I work slowly, by hand, in a home full of plants and light and small gathered things. My paintings have been exhibited in Australia and internationally, and have found their way into private collections around the world.

If you’d like to follow the work as it’s made, you’ll find me on Instagram @robynrichartist, or you’re welcome to get in touch.