15 Sep Spaces or voids

Artists like Luc Tymans, Gerhard Richter, Alex Katz, use photographs, sometimes found photographs as references for paintings. The work seems to have spaces. Absences that perhaps the viewer can fill in with their own memories or readings. Spaces the viewer can inhabit. They speak of analogue, printed, actual photos. These works speak of the printing process, the dots on paper. I feel like digital photography is different. The photos I find on my phone don’t have spaces. They might have voids; infinitely deep. They reach into all the information in all the digital world. A photo I find that isn’t mine contains a date, a time, a place. The data is traceable the images searchable, trackable. AI can use the images to build new places, new faces. Companies can use the images to send me targeted advertising. I can reverse search the image and find other images that are similar. Perhaps the same place, perhaps just the same colour.

Painting from digital photos, I can zoom in to tiny pixels, I can open the image text files and see the code behind the images. If I was cleverer I could even find things there, hide things there. Replicating digital photos in painting feels like it needs to contain the device itself in some way. The blackness of the screen, the sticky finger prints, the smudged sunblock on my screen, the swipe and pinch of viewing that I find myself doing to printed images, to text that’s too small for my increasingly blurry eyesight. Traditional western landscape gazes. The artist gazes upon the scene, the viewer gazes upon the painting. The eye following a composition, drawn into the scene itself. What id you don’t gaze, what if you glance. My eye skims over the surface, flickers and shifts. The skys too bright, I can hear the cars driving past. Google maps tells me there’s something to look at, or I’ve been here before. I have a list of things to do. How would I paint this? Is it worthy of a photo? A photo with someone in it? Reminds me of another place. What is this place called? Will I mark it on my map? Post an image on Instagram? Once I have a photo of this it sits already in the cloud. I can reach it from my laptop, its like it is already in my studio ready to be used as material, to be stored, to be lost.