Blue Haze Painting

The painting as representation of memory. Using the process of painting to create a reference to the past and evoke a connection between the viewer and the artist. This work is based on an old black and white photograph of Amsterdam I came across a while back. In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes described a photograph as containing a message without a code. Unlike language, a photograph has a direct relationship to what its represents. So one does not need knowledge of a particular code to understand what one is looking at in a photograph. He also says that a photograph contains two sorts of messages. A denoted message, which is the knowledge one gets by looking at the photograph. In this, case a picture of the canals of Amsterdam taken in the early 1900’s. However, it also has another meaning. A connoted message, which is one that we add to a photograph. And the message I added to the black and white photograph I used as the basis of this painting is one of a particular memory of my youth and working in Amsterdam. While the original photograph of Amsterdam is of a much earlier time, I could still see in it the streets that I once walked and this made me recall the time I spent as a young man from Dublin meeting new people and experiencing new experiences within a new and exciting city. And using the photograph as the source for my painting, by adding colour and so forth, the process became an exercise in memory and recollection that I hope comes across in the finished work. It was painted in 2016 and is oil on canvas stretched on a wooden stretcher and is ready to be hung.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:40 W x 30 H x 2 D in

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