Sometimes the smallest works of art demand the biggest double take.

This week’s Art Love belongs to Robyn Rich, a Melbourne-based artist whose wonderfully peculiar miniature oil paintings have completely captured my attention. Rich paints exquisitely detailed eyes, faces and figures onto vintage spoons, tins and found objects, transforming the overlooked into tiny treasures with enormous personality.

Her fascination with eyes nods to the tradition of the Georgian Lover’s Eye, miniature portraits once commissioned as intimate tokens to secretly carry the gaze of someone you loved. Rich gives that romantic tradition a wonderfully contemporary, slightly surreal twist.

I especially love the contrast between her beautifully rendered paintings and their humble, timeworn surfaces. A tarnished spoon suddenly becomes a portrait. An old tin becomes a tiny stage. Proof that art certainly doesn’t have to be enormous to command a room.

Rich is currently working on The Seen, an ambitious collection of approximately 100 painted eyes on found objects, scheduled to be exhibited at Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte in March 2027.

Consider me officially watching.

Explore more of Robyn Rich’s work at Hidell Brooks Gallery.

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