G@%*#%!

Well it has been a while. This one took... an age.

Artist Statement:

When Pablo Picasso first started painting Guernica, it was done as a reaction to the Nazi Terror Bombing of a Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War. It depicts the chaotic and horrifying experiences of the townspeople as their world is torn up around them. The cubist, jagged nature of the work helps convey the chaotic scene and the dramatic emotion being shown.

With my digital painting, much like how Picasso reacted to the bombings, my work is more a reaction to the Guernica. Instead of an actual bombing, my work is more of a ‘media’ or ‘cultural bomb’. Picasso would have heard the news of this town’s fate in a piece of paper or a television screen, and I sought to bring Picasso’s madness into a reality that could be more easily understood, what with our fast internet connections and 24/7 news reports on the Malaysian Airplane disasters, ISIS, the Middle East, and the Ebola infection. My work is also making political statements about the Internet as a culture, and tries to come to grasp with issues such as piracy and censorship (hence the title).

In this work, Picasso’s characters have been replaced with other, perhaps even more recognisable ones; some of them are cultural icons, others are not. Homer Simpson, Darth Vader, the Genie from Aladdin (who was voiced by Robin Williams), Casper, the Tardis – these are all cultural icons that some of us recognise and have grown up with or loved. However, like in Guernica, they are suffering too. Some are perhaps in agony, others are simply reacting, complacent or relishing in the chaos around them. Some of the more notable characters are presented in such a way that they would not normally be shown in their own universes. The zombie is a retired blind (and educated) veteran, Casper and the Genie are miserable, the Grimm is stunned or scared and Darth Vader is in anguish.

Also here are artistic references to other well-known works. Banksy’s stencils appear along one of the building’s walls, along with the chicken monster from Bosche’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ who just sits and adds noise with his trumpet to the hell around him. Guernica of course gets its own references, with tattoos of the eye symbol on some of the characters, and the overlayed stencil of the shapes still present in their ghostly state, like broken glass. The eye is now a light - a flare, and in many ways, it represents the media.

When I was creating this work, I was also surprised to find just the general lack of digital painters in the high art world. My work is also in response to this, and simply asks audiences of the effects of taking these respected art works from these artists, and putting them into a digital form instead. I other words “what if Guernica was a digital painting instead?” or “what if Hieronymus Bosch was a digital artist?”