Detail of Bouguereau and vintage face by Kelly Price-Colston. Click for full image on Flickr.

Kelly Price-Colston from Arkansas, USA, operating under the name paperballet (website, MySpace, Flickr), calls herself a mixed media artist. In 2008 she created an online Facial Mutations exhibition on Blue Ruin Gallery. In her own words:

“this series is an exploration of the things we show and hide in our faces. beneath every smile is a sadness. in every grimace happiness lurks. what we reveal and challenge others to find out about us intrigues me. my works layer the depth and chaos we cannot really explain to people, but it comes out nonetheless, without our knowledge more often than not. the social stigma of loss and pain are evident in long pauses and time passed. using vintage photographs where the subject had to wait for long periods of time before a portrait was taken made sense to me. plus, in not knowing the individuals, i was able to objectively make the person’s face more my own.” [...]

Shown above is one of the works at the exhibition, featuring an unnamed face on a vintage postcard, joined with a detail of Bouguereau’s Sketch of a Young Woman (date of painting unknown). Below you can compare the two. Click the first to visit the Portraits gallery here on Bouguereau Remastered. Click the second to visit the Facial Mutations exhibition.