Blog 2

                                          Artist: Dan Hays

                                                    Title: Colorado Impression 11b

                                                    Date: 2002

                                                    Medium: Oil on Canvas

This large landscape painting by Dan Hays is inspired by photographs he found on the personal website of a man also called Dan Hays who lives in Blackhawk, Colorado. Colorado Impression is a response to the growing proliferation of information, particularly visual information, on the internet.The painting is compiled of a sequence of small squares of bright color, which retain the pixelated quality of the computer-generated image the artist used as his source picture. The photographs on the website are in JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format. JPEGs are compressed digital images that have become the standard format for use on internet sites. The compression mechanism allows a picture to be stored in a relatively small size, but detail is lost when the image is decompressed. Hays is able to replicate the loss of value to JPEG images when decompressed. He accentuates tonal changes that occur when a JPEG image is decompressed by squaring off the canvas and systematically applying small areas of color which are matched to a digital section of the image stored in his computer.

                                          Artist: Malcolm Morley

                                          Title: Mariner

                                          Date: 1998

                                          Medium: Oil on Canvas

Malcolm Morley's paintings from the early 1990s are vastly influenced by memories of childhood events and activities. Morley's paintings reflect his interest in conflict and catastrophe, an experience he had grown up with: 'I was subject to bombing and brought up on war films.' (Quoted in Whitfield 2001, p.15.) The subject of several of his works can be traced back to a repressed event from his childhood. Model ships and airplanes are objects prevalent in his works rooting back to his childhood love of them. The memory that he had suppressed was during the Blitz he witnessed his favourite model boat, HMS Nelson, being blown apart by a bomb which fell near his home. The loss of that object inspired four earlier maritime disaster paintings, which he reworked to form the Mariner painting. He uses bright shades of color to form the collage like painting. To create Mariner Morley scanned slides of the earlier paintings into a computer. An assistant then used the computer program PhotoShop to cut-and-paste a rough compositional draft. Morley then squared up the canvas with a grid, carefully painting in one box at a time. The finished piece is a miscellany of discontinuous scenes to evoke the theme of disaster and evoke a chaotic tone.