Description
This image is derived from – Departures in Wonderland 2018. Which was something of a stand out image in terms of the Panotrait series. The title speaks I think quite well to the Panotrait series intentions too, in that it feels like entering a new place, and the colours in the piece assist the feeling of curiosity. So making a reprise visit to this image felt like quite an appropriate venture. Little did I know about what was about to happen to the Panotrait series…… It turned out to be the most productive, and necessary digression in this series as yet to date. I’d already felt that the series was metaphor laden, and one of the most apparent metaphors within the Panotraits thus far, especially the stripped images, like Departures in Wonderland 2018, was “bringing the past into focus”
So now what I had done to create Departures in Wonderland 2022(Version 1),was instead of expanding the image on the lateral plane exclusively, the same approach had been applied on the vertical plane too. This has profound effects on the image. So in effect you are looking at a 3X3 squaring of the 9 images that make up Departures in Wonderland 2022. The profound effect is the up scaling and retention of the original image using this construction technique, which if I am honest is still something I am trying to fully comprehend. The most analogous thing i can think of to articulate what is going on in this image is – If you’ve ever “zipped up” photographs to send attached to an e mail, you’ll have used an algorithm of some variation that reduces the pixel content in the image by anything from 25 to 30%, and yet the image content remains consistent to the original unreduced image. Well, this is the inverse of that, so instead of “image reduction”, this is “image induction”. As I say, it’s still something I am trying to comprehend fully, but a discovery i am extremely proud of. Especially as this is an great indicator of where the larger Panotrait project with 5X5X5 portraits may well be going visually. It was very difficult not to immediately just lunge off into another project pertaining to this discovery. There is still so much to say about what the metaphors that are in this image, and the ones produced like it since making this one. A persistent metaphor is “a bigger notion of the self”, but I also feel there are allusions to digital media and the impact that has had on the perception of the self, or the geometric substrate all of these images are based on, no matter how loosely I paint them by hand. The inspiration just seems to abound from them…….
