«Anthropic»

In 1973 astronomers met in Kraków to mark 500 years since the birth of Copernicus, the man who moved Earth out of the centre of the universe. There the physicist Brandon Carter put forward what he called the anthropic principle: whatever we observe has to be compatible with the fact that we exist to observe it. The word comes from the Greek anthropos, a human being, and it is where this glitch portrait painting begins.

Anthropic is a face split down the middle. On one side the skin is warm brown paint, with an ear and dark hair. On the other it turns pale and grey, drawn more than painted, with the same wide eye looking straight at you. Below the nose a strip of the face slides out of line, and the lips go grey. Around the chin and neck the portrait breaks into blocks of orange, yellow and navy, like a picture loading badly. Hot pink and blue bars cut across the forehead. Columns of scrambled, mirrored type run over the surface, and three QR codes sit around the face, along with a few other small black code marks.

Chuck Close spent the late 1960s building huge heads out of grids, and his Big Self-Portrait dates from 1967 and 1968. Gerhard Richter went the other way in his photo paintings of the 1960s, dragging the brush across photographed faces until they went soft. I wanted both in one head, the cold grid and the blur. I like that the colour eye and the grey eye look equally awake. I painted it as an original pop art painting, and I count it as contemporary pop art because the subject is so ordinary: a face on a screen. To me a glitch portrait painting only works if it looks back at you, and this one does, so I see it as art for office walls.

This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. There is also a hand-finished lithograph, ordered through Instagram or email.