One or two eyes

'She is looking through me' observed my friend. She was referring to one of four figures in a painting I'd been working on. All of them are looking at something and where their eyes are directed is making a difference. One figure is behind a camera, and his "eye"is taking in the sight through a technical device. Another figure is looking at the two others which gaze out at the viewer. These two are layered on eachother, and the one in the fore is someone I know personally, and the one underneath symbolic. This last was causing trouble. She was looking at us, with one eye was obscured, and indeed she seemed to look past you. I tried various things; a hooded eye,closed, squinting, frowning, smiling, but the gaze was still blank. Finally I tried two eyes, and going from eye to eye she was suddenly less staring, though I had done little other than make sure both pupils were centred. Could it be the fact that by absorbing that she had two eyes, it became apparent that she could triangulate, and that we felt seen? Her eyes could now train in on us, whereas before that was not a sure thing? This then suggests how much our eyes are connected to our understanding of spatiality, and how much we rely on our eyes to give us a sense of how someone else is looking at us. The nature of the look is deternined by how we understand the eys function. However having four eyes trained on me was disconcerting. I briefly considered her face turned away but then she was less present. Then I wondered about a mask. Would she be too wooden? She was not. She became a presence that was not distracted and nor did it compete with the immediacy of the fore figure. I did not catch all the iterations, but here are four. I think I like the first one best!