"empty gaze" is a perfectly acceptable phrase that can be used in written English.
Example: The old lady's eyes were filled with a hollow, empty gaze.
You can follow the empty gaze of the winged messengers, and peer down on ant-like visitors below.
The first time, Ms. Neuwirth performs the number with a tired, jaded voice and a lost, empty gaze.
Catherine Deneuve's glassy stare of anxiety dominates the movie: it is like Janet Leigh's empty gaze at the end of the Psycho shower scene.
The empty gaze of the old into the distance is mirrored in the gaze of the young into slot machines.Atlantic City once had Young's Million-Dollar Pier, which became Hamid's Million-Dollar Pier: although gambling was never allowed there, the name encapsulated both brassy new entertainment and the off-chance of getting rich.
Barbarino, who had the soft, empty gaze of a gazelle, sat at the back of the class churning out Brooklyn witticisms like "Up your nose with a rubba hose" -- a perfect warm-up for Mr. Travolta's breakthrough film role as Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever".
Behind my empty gaze was the looming burden of not knowing whether I was capable of committing to any decision about my pregnancy.
Throughout wide swathes of Bosnia, in the months after the war began, the Serbian violence, most of it against civilians, was overwhelming: villages of Muslims uprooted, massacres, skeletal figures whose empty gazes behind barbed-wire fences announced the return of concentration camps to Europe.
In either case, you find yourself at the bottom of somebody else's hole and they either want to drag you into a conflict with them or to swallow you whole within their sad, empty gazes, sucking you down into their own oblivion.
More beguiling yet is the ceremonial helmet thought to have belonged to King Raedwald of the East Angles, its empty eyesockets gaze at you across 1,500 years of English history.
HOUSTON (AP) — Chris Canetti, the president of the Houston Dynamo, sat in the highest row of empty BBVA Compass Stadium, gazed west at the city skyline and made a bold prediction.
The other distinct group is a rather maudlin crew of crepe hangers who tell me they wander into the empty bedrooms and gaze at fading mementos.
