LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON STATEMENT

This is the first painting 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" which is generally regarded as the first "modern art" painting. 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 by applying destructive forces to an object over and over again.

When an object is aged, it has been subjected to the 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 this painting, I shrank the image down to 1% of it's size, then blew it back up again. When this happens, the computer program 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 up again. Examples of this can be seen in images, especially on the internet, that appear "jagged" or pixelated.

On it's own, this 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 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 exact same 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 painting is an image that has been aged in the context of the digital realm.