The closer you get....

While watching images of the first days of the Iraq war on television, particularly those live images of embedded troops, I was struck by how poor the image quality was, particularly any movement which seemed to break up into pixels. I though it strange that the most immediate news was not seen clearly, and that to really understand what was happening one would have to wait for later filmed pictures or to wait until the dust had died down. In some way the immediacy of the situation made it less clear – we would have to stand back to see with some perspective what really happened. Once I had decided that I would like to paint something which expressed this lack of clarity close up, and chose a photo I had taken of myself, zoomed in on the eyes. When an image is scrambled in the media to make a person unidentifiable, it is often the eyes which are pixilated. I learned from a nephew, how to pixilate an image and finally decided on the correct degree which wouldn’t entirely obscure the image, nor would be such fine pixilation that the finished painting would seem too much like a photograph.I decided on a large format for the sake of drama and so that the squares of colour I would be painting wouldn’t be impossibly tiny. The difficulty was to keep the same tonal range. The previous pixel picture I had done “Lips” was small and possible to paint in one long sitting. The eyes format would require a more extended time frame.Once I had painted at least a preliminary colour in all of the squares I wanted to see the progress, so had a friend hold the picture up on the balcony of a high rise building. I went down to the street and was shocked to see a perfect photo of my own eyes enlarged. The picture only suffers from an appropriate place to hang it where viewers can see it at a distance and close up. Most people when seeing the picture at normal gallery distance have little idea what it portrays without some hints, but seen from a distance the image is unmistakable.The title “The closer you get…., is a version of an old Clairol hair colour ad, which becomes in my version, “The closer you get…the less you see.”