«Desire 02»

In 1965 the video artist Nam June Paik put a big magnet on top of a television set and let the picture warp. He called the piece Magnet TV. A screen that was meant to deliver a clean, perfect face suddenly could not hold it together. It is how I think about desire too, and why I made Desire 02 as a digital glitch painting. Wanting someone is never a sharp image. It always flickers a little.

That warped screen is the starting point of this painting.

A woman with wild orange-red hair fills the canvas against a dark brown background, the hair swept sideways in thick, fast strokes. Her face sits at the top left, with only the eyes and a few touches of pink still in place. Below it her figure curves down the middle and then breaks into horizontal strips of neon green, pink, blue and yellow, each one sliding out of line like a signal going bad. Thin yellow lines and a few magenta squares float in the dark.

The hair is loose and painted by hand. The body is where the picture fails. I like that contrast, because the warm part stays human and the cold part turns into data.

Pop art has always been about women as images, and contemporary pop art still is. Lichtenstein painted comic-style girls in flat colour and dots in the early 1960s, and Drowning Girl came in 1963. Warhol made his Marilyn Diptych in 1962, with one half in colour and the other half fading out. I took the same fascination and let the image itself break, which is where a digital glitch painting starts. As an original pop art painting it works as statement wall art in a room that can handle a lot of colour.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. A hand-finished lithograph of this work exists, and you can order it the same way, through Instagram or email.