Control Rooms at Class Room

6 years, 9 months ago Old News 0

Control Rooms at Class Room

27th January – 16th February 2017 16 Lower Holyhead Road, Coventry CV1 3AU

The source of these digital assisted paintings, drawings and watercolours are of images I photographed from the television of documentaries on Sellafield Nuclear Power Station and images culled from the internet on the theme “Man and Machine“.

Though not averse to humour and wit in art I resisted calling this exhibition – “Men Playing With Knobs“. However, there is some truth with this Freudian relationship of men and technology.

These paintings owe their existence to my renewed interest in 1950s technology with the rediscovery of my 1983 painting of the WITCH computer, and my relationship with the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where the computer now resides.

I am interested in how quickly and badly 20th century technology dates. Paintings don’t age like technology. A 100 year old Picasso would still be ‘modern art’ and look as if it was painted yesterday, whilst a car of that period would be ‘veteran’!

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Photography always refers to the past, even recent photographs refer to a past moment. Paintings are about now, even old paintings refer to the present. It’s the nature of painting.

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(This could be a justification for painting from photographs, though I have never see this reason used).

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I am sceptical about technology and its uses; these paintings are not celebrations of technology but are more a warning. I am concerned with revealing these controlling men, hidden, watching, listening, the men with the finger on the button.

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I am now working in two new versions of the WITCH, the ‘Live WITCH’. My new paintings of the WITCH computer are central to this series on Man and Machine.

Link: http://www.pluspace.com/classroom/index.html

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 at 7:26 am

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Control Rooms at Class Room

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