Deterioration
1999, oil on canvas, 90 x 120cm
Notes:
In 1999 there was a blockbuster exhibition at the Royal Academy in London called Monet in the 20th Century. I didn't go, fearing a vast sea of heads blocking a direct communion with Monet's great water lily paintings. Instead, I sent off for a video tour of Monet's garden at Giverny, advertised in a newspaper in association with the exhibition. I took numerous slide photographs of the footage on the tv screen as the camera panned across the lily pond.
I worked from projected slides, simplifying tonal information and working in vertical strips, echoing the red, green and blue that make up video images. The two paintings present very little visual information connecting the viewer to the original location. This failure is the subject - how successive technological visual filters, from video, photography and painting remove us from nature. Although Monet's garden is also an idealised, constructed, artificial landscape.
These two small works directly fed into conceptualising the Colorado Impressions project, linking Impressionism with digital image compression.