Since the late 1990s, my work has explored the relationship between the intangible, encoded and instantaneous realm of digital technology, and the tactile, imperfect and time-consuming medium of painting. Often working from low-quality landscape photographs and video stills sourced from the Internet, images are extensively digitally manipulated before being methodically transcribed onto canvas. My paintings present a paradoxical visual realm where shimmering pixels and physical brushstrokes coalesce. Within the matrix of the screen – and the woven canvas – my intention has always been to bridge this seemingly impossible divide.

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My contention has been that painting at the scale of the pixel allows for a reconciliation of these two divergent media. This can be linked back to my appreciation of low-resolution images twenty years ago, which put me in mind of post-Impressionist painting, especially Monet and Seurat. Yet over recent years my project has been troubled by the increasing invisibility of the pixel through ever-higher camera and screen resolutions. Also, we have witnessed the disappearance of compression artifacts and glitches that used to give digital photographs distinctive visual qualities. I continue to simulate and accentuate these effects in my paintings, but how is this interpreted now, compared to their apparent novelty two decades ago? Clearly, there has been an increasing danger that my work will be viewed as anachronistic, being devoted to an outmoded form of digital image tinged with nostalgia.

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For this presentation I will show a selection of paintings from the last five years, which in various ways have aimed to extend the life of the (visibly) pixelated image, insisting on its potential vitality. Starting with works that engage with Letchworth – the world’s first garden city – and ending with an on-going series that follows a wildfire in California, I will discuss how the pixelated articulation of the screen image, and its rendering in paint, can carry meanings relevant to the places and scenes depicted.