Screen #4 Painting

Visual artists have to contend with the phenomena of image proliferation, over three hundred and fifty million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day, and in September 2016 the total number of photos shared on Instagram was over thirty five billion. Pictorial practice resides in visual culture and as an artist I feel compelled to engage critically with the changes happening in my own time in order to investigate a pictorial discourse. The single most important event in my lifetime has been the birth of the digital age. Over the past two decades screens have proliferated; desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, digital TV screens etc. We are now living in a technologically driven society in which digital gadgets have totally changed the way we receive, manipulate and circulate information. Changes in technology are accelerating exponentially, analogue information is being converted into digital information, every aspect of life is being captured and stored in some digital form. We are moving closer towards the networked interconnection of everything. The digitisation of everything has been a revolutionary change for mankind primarily because of its scale and pace. Every technological revolution coincides with changes in what it means to be a human being, in the kinds of psychological borders that divide the inner life from the world outside. The digital revolution suddenly increased the rate and scale of change in almost everyone’s lives. Human character changed when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. In the digital age, life has become increasingly public, open, external, immediate, and exposed. A smartphone is no longer just a smartphone but a potential revolution. Technology is adding to the language of painting, allowing for more references, for a more sophisticated, complex language to evolve, one that references the increasingly digitised world in which we live. My concern is with expanding the language of painting and digital imaging is today’s most powerful visual reference and it is adding a huge amount to this language. In a world where everything is being digitised, there is an imperative for artists to make visible this process in order to humanise it in some way. Painting adds something that digital media do not have, something handmade and tactile, and an invitation to direct experience.