Week 4: Project Proposal

Project Statement

Owen Learns to Paint is about having fun and creating a new process for a traditional artform. It is personal to me, it is my performative attempt to learn how to paint in an unconventional way. I will use the tools at my disposal in 2025 and ignore traditional advice despite a nearly 50,000 year old history. I’m inspired by the early digital works of Vera Molnar, Eduardo Kac, and Hiroshi Kawano, to name a few, and their predecessors who created similar systems with pixels and grids like Piet Mondrian and Gerhard Richter.

Motivation

I had this idea about a year ago that I would learn to paint, but I am too lazy to buy brushes, oil, and canvas, and I certainly don’t have the dexterity or patience to actually go through with actually learning. But I wanted to learn, so I created my own process and ignored traditional advice. To paint daily and with as little effort as possible, I decided that I would paint a pixel a day, starting at a low pixel count and gradually working my way up to greater and greater detail.

Although “a pixel a day” was discontinued only two weeks after starting, I hope to breathe new life into the process in anticipation of my senior thesis.

Context Review

My nearest neighbors appear to be NFT artists like Rafaël Rozendaal. It might be natural to make this project an NFT thing, but I’m not particularly interested in any sort of marketing or monetization of my project, nor am I very fond of the NFT space. I want to regress a little bit and mimic digital artists in early computer technologies. [See Arreola-Burns, Pita, et al. Digital Art : 1960s - Now.]

Project Plan / Design

Making the paintings

For the next 72 days (as of writing, February 22nd) I will make 5 paintings a day, to total ~360 paintings. I will use Adobe Photoshop to compose each painting digitally.

The exhibition

For the exhibit, these paintings will be presented in three modes:

1. Each painting will be printed on dot matrix roll paper. My favorite ~15 or so paintings will be mounted, and the other hundreds of paintings will be loosely scattered on a table, free to take.
2. A VCR television will present a slideshow of the paintings.
3. Each painting will be uploaded to a purpose-built project website.

The website

A website will be created to host information about the project and a gallery of the paintings. This will likely be linked to my portfolio website, and will be created using the Next.js framework, a CMS with Sanity.io, and hosted on Vercel. [Website prototype in progress]