Dave Cowey
My work explores the role of images/oil painting in the modern world.
I am artist who makes/fakes paintings. My working process involves sampling motifs from old master paintings and digitally manipulating them using software packages such as Photoshop. These saturated images not only convey ideas of the proliferation of Images in modern life, but also refer back to times when oil paintings would have been the main source of realistic images and would have had a powerful, almost magical effect on the viewer. The resultant images are then preserved in amber resin – I then carve ornate wooden frames for these images.
The resultant objects create a double illusion – an illusion of being a traditional oil painting, where coloured paint creates the illusion of the depicted image. These paintings explore the middle ground between:-
Reality / Illusion.
The Authentic / The Fake.
The Antique / The Modern.
The Meaningful / The Nihilistic.
The Craft Object / The Mass Produced Object.
