Constance ARI

Digital photography and image manipulation has profoundly effected the way many contemporary painters construct their paintings. The computer is both a mechanical tool to aid the elaboration of working studies for a painting and a way of conceiving of space within a two-dimensional image. Whilst this phenomenon is not new (photography has been around for a long time) the peculiar layering of the computer generated image and it's mixing of pixels does find resonance in painting. These five undergraduate painters from the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart are painting about very different things but all confront the issue of what space to put into a picture. For them, it is a mediated space: in it's construction it is layered or digital or photographic. It may not be the space of the real world or indeed the virtual world but it is the real palpable space of painting.

Digital photography and image manipulation has profoundly effected the way many contemporary painters construct their paintings. The computer is both a mechanical tool to aid the elaboration of working studies for a painting and a way of conceiving of space within a two-dimensional image. Whilst this phenomenon is not new (photography has been around for a long time) the peculiar layering of the computer generated image and it's mixing of pixels does find resonance in painting. These five undergraduate painters from the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart are painting about very different things but all confront the issue of what space to put into a picture. For them, it is a mediated space: in it's construction it is layered or digital or photographic. It may not be the space of the real world or indeed the virtual world but it is the real palpable space of painting.