MY EDEN LIFE
These paintings explore the attributes of ‘the image’ through the re-presentation, in oil paint on board, of the amateur family snapshot. The paintings are taken from found photographs, discovered in garage sales, by roadsides and in second-hand shops from all over the world. They are then uploaded to webpages for the curiosity, aesthetic and voyeuristic pleasure of the internet public. In these times of multiple copies of the unsubstantial image, I am interested in the journey of a memento that becomes a discarded or unwanted object and how this passage of family and uncertainty can facilitate in interpreting the past, and the present. Each image I selected to reproduce displays a degree of failure, either with the technical handling of the camera by the photographer, the material deterioration of the photograph itself or by the subject’s performance before the camera and by the process of hand painting. Focus turns to artistic performance as a mediated experience, emphasizing the method and process that the construction entailed. It transforms the attributes from being intrinsic and integral to being an extrinsic critical disruption.
Considerations of time and value are unwrapped in the re-representing of these thin slithers of time by the slow process of painting. Household enamel paint is applied over a board with a single layer of artist’s oil paint, emphasizing each individual stroke and mark made.