SELFIE/Peitho the Tease ” x ” · Carbon pencil, blackening watercolours, and inks on paper mounted to canvas · [Year if known, e.g., 2021–2025]
This painting captures Peitho—the Greek goddess of persuasion, seduction, and teasing charm—in the guise of a modern selfie. She holds the phone at arm's length, lips curved in a knowing smile, eyes locked on the viewer through the screen. The iPhone has become a larger expanding mirror of self, its surface swelling outward like a dark pool, reflecting her face back infinitely while the blackening drips trail from her fingers into the glass, as if the act of capturing is already dissolving her into endless versions.
Peitho is the eternal tease: she draws you in with beauty and promise, persuades with a glance, then slips away before the touch. The expanding mirror multiplies her image—seductive, elusive, always one step ahead—turning self-presentation into both power and trap. The blackening layers spread across her skin and the phone's screen like the seductive veil she casts, charming yet inescapable.
The work confronts the complexity of being seen and seeing oneself: how persuasion can be both weapon and invitation, how the desire to be desired can bind and liberate at once, how the mirror we hold up to ourselves grows larger than we are. Yet in the deepest blackening, a faint gleam reflects in the phone's infinite recursion—the quiet possibility that even in endless self-display, something honest and unguarded can still slip through.
A meditation on seduction, self-display, the thin line between charm and manipulation, and the enduring optimism that persists when we look past the pose—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to let the tease be the final truth.
Inquiries welcome for acquisition, studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com