Environments
November 2009, Martienssen Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand
In the aerial landscapes, I constructed a series of paintings regarding services, trade, agriculture and infrastructures around South African metropoles. The paintings are based on images collected from the Internet, mostly from user-uploaded photographs onto Google Earth. The series presents a zoomed-out view of the areas in and around cities. The linear quality of these painting-drawings is achieved by following a tracing-painting process. First images are traced onto acetate with a felt-tipped pen. This drawing is then projected onto a stretched canvas and the projected image is either traced with charcoal and then painted, or painted directly. The forests paintings are also made by this tracing-painting process. In these images, I included the outline of the edge of the overhead projector. The images of the forests were sourced from the Internet, and the names are the filenames as they were saved onto my computer. It is through this abstracting process that a painting can become something other than what it is a painting of. The portraits are part of a series created from images taken from a forensic pathology handbook. These humans will soon return to earth as raw matter. All features of their faces are simplified, including the point of impact. The faces become landscapes themselves, created out of topologies defined by contours and measured points.
