"Banana" Painting

Today ‘posterised’ art images and prints come two a penny – albeit costing lot more on poster sites selling them. Indeed anyone can now ‘posterise’ or ‘oil paint’ an image with a single click using the ‘image editing’ and ‘special effects’ software built into their digital cameras, smart phones, tablet apps or computer ‘paint’ programmes.

Though the results are often very surprising, pleasing and even dramatic, what characterises this instant ‘techno-art’ of posteri(s/z)ation and other special effects such as ‘oil painting’ is precisely they requires no art and even no artist at all to create. For unless the images which are posterised are based on authentic art photography, the sole ‘artist’ is just a piece of in-built digital software.

All the more surprising then, to come across an artist called Paul Bress who - without use or even knowledge of instant digital posterisation and other technical tricks - came to spontaneously create acrylic art portraiture sharing the same basic character of technical ‘posterisation art’– the use of unmerged colour zones - albeit with one big difference. For the result is actually a work of art in the traditional sense – created through the genuine and impressive painterly skills of a real live artist and not just by an automated and instantaneous technical process.

Paul Bress describes his particular art style as ‘zonism’, contrasting its use of unmerged and ungradated colour zones with other forms of post-impressionist art - but without any reference to the automated digital transformation of images into unmerged colour zones through ‘posterisation’ and other image-editing effects such as ‘oil painting’ likenesses. Some might therefore consider his view of ‘zonism’ as a wholly original art style as therefore wholly naive.

If so, then through this apparent naiveté, Paul Bress has actually ventured something much more historically significant that he even he himself thinks - namely to buck the trend that has led to the ever-increasing digitalisation and technologisation of art and painting. Indeed he has unknowingly but effectively reversed this trend - returning us from one-click techno-art to authentic artistic and painterly ‘craft’ – craft, craftsmanship and art being in fact, the original meaning of the Greek word techne.

Paul describes his own journey as an artist as follows:

“I started painting with acrylics (first in black and white, and then in colour).