LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON STATEMENT

These paintings are the first in a new series that I am currently working on. In my past work I have been exploring the concept of history and aging in a painting. Originally I was painting large, textured surfaces that had the appearance of being aged over time. Afterwards, I began a series of works on metal using chemicals to physically change and "age" the surface.

With this new series, I am exploring these same themes and concepts in a new way. I began with an image of Pablo Picasso's painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”. The idea was to create a painting that was "aged" digitally. By this I do not mean trying to create what one would imagine a painting or object to look like after it has been aged over time. Rather, I mean aging by applying destructive forces to an object over and over again.

When an object is aged, it has been subjected to repetitive, minor destructive forces over an extended period of time; for example, the slow staining of a wall from drips or the rusting of a piece of metal. With a digital image, there are many "destructive" forces that can be applied to cause the image to lose information. With the first painting, I shrank the image down to 1% of its size, and then blew it back up again. When this happens, the computer has to do the best job it can of deciding what information to fill in the empty spaces created between pixels when it is blown back up again. In the newest painting, I blurred and then sharpened the image over and over again, causing the computer to have to make similar decisions, resulting in a very different image.

Doing either of these destructive actions once or even a few times does not alter the image substantially. But when applied hundreds of times, it loses more and more information to the point where it becomes virtually unrecognizable. Applying this digitally destructive force over and over again is the digital equivalent of a wall or piece of metal that has been subjected to the elements over many years.

After the image was created in Photoshop, I painted it in oil on a canvas roughly 8 feet square, the same exact size as the original Picasso painting. By repainting this "digitally" aged image, a strange alternate version of the painting is created. Rather than a painting that has been ripped, stained or discolored over time, the paintings are images that have been aged in the context of the digital realm.