Hybrid landscapes
The following paintings are inspired by a personal nostalgia for 8-bit and 16-bit video games that I played growing up in the 1980’s and early ’90’s. The use of retro video games as source material became a logical avenue to investigate ideas of memory, sentimentality, and nostalgia. I’m interested in the ways we tend to have skewed memories of our past, or more specifically, the way memories from our childhood form recollections of an idealized past. I start the process by playing an array of original Nintendo and Super Nintendo games, taking screenshots from different stages of games. I then use Photoshop to layer visual assets from different games to construct an amalgamated and modified game environment. This template is transferred onto the painting surface and becomes a point of departure, allowing for a transformative creative process to happen at the easel. While these new hybrid landscapes become settings for my own developing narratives, some visual elements may appear familiar and the original game source recognizable. However, the constructed landscapes never actually existed in the older video games, perhaps causing a faulty memory or a quasi-nostalgic experience for those who might have enjoyed playing these games from that era. I like to view each painting as a proverbial screenshot of a point on a map to an ever expanding world I’m creating for myself.
**Click on thumbnails for full image.
**Click on thumbnails for full image.
Homage series
This series of paintings consist of augmented visual elements from some of my favorite video games. In some paintings, I have chosen a certain stage of a game for its composition, color scheme or iconic resonance. I’m interested in reducing the dynamical visual information in a game down to a more minimal interpretation in the painting. All character sprites and graphic pixelations are eliminated from the compositions, resulting in a simplified, reductive painting aesthetic. My aim is to transform the fast-paced game play into a more slowed down, nostalgic and sentimental viewing experience in the paintings. **Click on images to enlarge.
Castles in the Air series
This series of paintings draw inspiration from a variety of sources, such as retro 8-bit Nintendo video games, pinball machine graphics, toy packaging designs, as well as from 1960’s psychedelic imagery and Pop Art aesthetics. These personally nostalgic references have become important source material that have motivated experiments with recurring themes and visual elements, such as vintage 1960’s psychedelic inspired flowers, star bursts, multi-colored light rays, rainbows, and geometric patterns. I feel as if each painting becomes like a screenshot of a new level of an expansive video game I’m creating for myself. **Click on images to enlarge.
