«Metaverse»

Metaverse, original painting

The word metaverse is older than any tech company that uses it. Neal Stephenson put it in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, as a virtual street where people walk around as avatars. In October 2021 Facebook renamed itself Meta, and a word from science fiction became a corporate slogan almost overnight.

That jump is the starting point of this painting. I think of it as metaverse art: a picture about living half inside a screen.

A woman's face fills the left side, painted in greys. One eye is open and looking at you. The rest of her face has slipped into horizontal strips, like a video that froze mid-call. A big red mouse cursor with a glitching black outline sits right on her eye, as if she were something to click on. On the right is a computer's start-up repair menu, white letters sinking into pink and yellow. Below it, tilted keyboard keys carry currency signs, edged in cyan and red like a cheap 3D effect. At the bottom a bag spills pastel ovals that could be candy or pills.

Artists went digital earlier than most people remember. In 1985 Andy Warhol drew a portrait of Debbie Harry on a Commodore Amiga computer, in front of an audience. I like that he treated the screen as a surface, not only a window.

My version is less friendly. The menu is the one you see when something has gone wrong, and she looks out of it calmly. I wanted contemporary pop art that feels the way scrolling feels: glossy, a little broken, hard to put down. As an original pop art painting it works as statement wall art for a room that needs a conversation starter. It is 110x95 cm, oil and acrylic on canvas.

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. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists. To order either one, message me on Instagram or by email.