School of Art - Theses

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Author: Sawrey, Anthony Raoul × End date: 2009 × Start date: 2004 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: contemporary art ×

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    Rain skating
    Sawrey, Anthony Raoul ( 2009)
    In the Twenty First Century, cheap digital video has challenged the photograph for the distribution of visual ideas. Clip sharing sites such as YouTube now receive up to two hundred thousand uploads per week shared by one hundred million users worldwide. This exegesis and its accompanying exhibition, discusses the painting of the ordinary and banal in relation to this recent emergence. It consists of 6 oil paintings depicting skateboarding; all reconfigured from low resolution digital stills found on clip sharing sites, exhibiting many of the signs of degradation and artifacts that are characteristic of digital images. Representation of the day to day in painting has its own discreet history, extending back to French Realism in the 19th century. Numerous artists of this time, in the spirit of the flâneur, made popular by French writer Charles Baudelaire, explored the streets, boulevards and lanes for those encounters that would become paintings. By the 1960’s the painting of everyday life had also shifted to the direct representation of photographic material from personal snapshots to images circulating in the mass media. Today, an artist following these same interests is also likely to make these searches online. For scenes capturing the ebb and flow of humanity, YouTube has become the virtual boulevard for the digital flâneur, a conceptualization of contemporary browsing that mirrors the casual stroller of the physical city in search of fresh experiences. What this shift signifies, is the fact that much of everyday life is now subsumed to the digital. Painting is important in realizing the significance of this fact, due to its ability to reveal the scope of which the formats of popular media act as a go between in a viewer’s experiences, and its long and extensive tradition in documenting the events of the everyday.