Colorado Impression 16 series

The 16 series is based on a webcam image from Spruce Saddle, Beaver Creek. There was a heavy mist, so just a fuzzy outline of pine trees was visible. Through accentuating the digital noise in the original image in Photoshop and super-imposing a circular lighting effect, an impression of a sun or moon filtering through the misty atmosphere was created. At the same time an impression of a spot-light shining on the image was intended, playing with perceptual ambiguities of natural and artificial light.

The introduction of rotational and mirrored symmetries is suggestive of perfect and effortless digital reproduction with a heavily compressed and nebulous image, one which relayed very little visual information about the scene. Symmetry implies something hermetic and enclosed, as opposed to the arbitrary or transient nature of the pictorial source.

Colorado Impression 16a, detail.

16c was painted first, followed by 16a, each taking around four months. They are supposedly exactly the same when turned upside-down. The paint mix and brush-stroke directions (either horizontal or vertical) are identical in corresponding blocks of colour across the canvases. Of course, given the unique physicality of individual brushstrokes, this perfect notional symmetry is merely approximate with paint as opposed to the digital images they were based on. The moon in 16c is exactly mid-grey in tone, as is the darkest area of pine tree in 16a.

16b came next, and here the silhouetted pine trees were repeated four times, creating the effect of a reflection in a lake. The lower half of the image was painted in a crude 'venetian blind' effect (as used in Colorado Impression 10b), giving the sense of ripples on the surface. Instead of filling the canvas with adjoining blocks of paint, the background was painted mid-grey and paint applied in 'caterpillar' brush-strokes, forming extensive spirals in larger areas of the same hue. An unforeseen effect of this was of an ancient symbolic script, Aztec or Mayan perhaps, or the ornamentations of Celtic illuminated manuscript or stone carving. The colour of the red sun was sampled from a reproduction of Monet's Impression Sunrise. It is the same tone as the surrounding sky, so disappears in black and white reproduction.

Black & white photo of Colorado Impression 16b.

16d presents another double symmetry, although here the top half of the image is stretched, looking a bit like a 1970s design.

"The image glows with eerie phosphorescence - the swamp-light of fireflies or a dying sun filtered through low-hanging mist. Viewed at a distance, references to landscape imagery and pixellation are apparent. Yet the overall impression is not so much that of an enlarged Jpeg - it's more as if the image of the landscape has been refracted through a melancholy prism - the insectoid eye of some faltering artificial intelligence."

(Extract from Faraway So Close essay by Marc Hulson in Turps Banana 5)

Colorado Impression 16d, detail.

Sometime during the production of the 16 series, whilst researching paintings by Caspar David Friedrich for a slide talk, I became aware of his use of symmetrical composition in paintings like The Cross in the Mountains (1812).

The use of symmetry with depictions of nature implies an underlying order to things, and can be viewed from several perspectives: the religious or spiritual; the scientific or technological; and the gothic or uncanny.

The 16 series paintings get smaller with each incarnation. This finite progression leaves room for six future paintings, although plans for this are hazy at the present time...