LES DEMOISELLES
D'AVIGNON
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LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON STATEMENT
In my work I have been exploring the concept
of history and aging in a painting. With
this series, "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon",
I am exploring these same themes and concepts
and how they can be applied to an image
in the digital realm.
I began with a picture 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 attempting to create what one would
imagine a painting or object to look like
after it has been aged over time. Rather,
I mean aging as being the application of
destructive forces to an object or image
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 in the series, I shrank the image
down to 1% of its size, and then blew it
back up again. When this happens, the computer
has to interpret what information to fill
in the empty space created between pixels
when it is blown back up again. In the other
paintings in the series, I applied different
ways of “aging” the image, causing
the computer to have to make similar decisions.
Applying any of these destructive actions
once or even a few times does not alter
the image substantially. But when applied
hundreds of times, the image 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
an object that has been subjected to the
elements over many years.
After the image was created in Photoshop,
I painted it in oil on canvas roughly 8
feet square, the 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 paintings are
images that have been aged in the context
of the digital realm.
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