Glitch #42 & #43
Experiments with digital glitch effects made in analog paint.
Two works of x by y cm (x x y"), 6 to 7 layers of spray paint on canvasboard.
Glitch #42 and #43 are the first works to incorporate digital glitch effects, image corruption and jpeg artifacts into my works. The aggresively broken images, combined with dark colours and kinky topics, are meant to give these paintings a more raw feeling that the works I made previously. The use of close-up view with the stripes and offsets that break the image make it so it might take a second before you see what is depicted. Or as one viewer said: “I don’t see what it is– is someone being arrested?” (sure mom).
The process
It took 42 images and pre-studies before I found the one I liked enough to turn into a painting, hence the titles.
I start with a regular photo, crop and edit it until the colors and contrast are suitable. The photo’s are then ‘broken’, for which I prefer to use a tool like this one, but also use a lot of editing in Photoshop to imitate artifacts similar to the ones you’d find on Glitch Art collection sides like this subreddit and this one. A history in IT and experience with broken harddrives helps a lot with this as well. Finally, another round of editing to make sure the contrast is good and the image is not too cluttered or unrecognizable. This involves some manual digital painting as well, before the actual painting starts. It also entails making sure the painting will work as a stencil. Since all layers will be cut from pieces of mylar, it is important that none of the colors form ‘islands’ that will fall out, or are too flimsy to stay attached in a coherent manner.
When the design work of the stencils is done, I have an automated knife plotter to cut the stencils for me, and the actual painting begins. Over the course of several hours or days, each layer is sprayed and dried until the final result is there. These particular ones, due to the fact that some layers include multiple colors, take come careful planning (and masking tape) to make it all work.
