![PAUL BEEL: "FROM PRE-DIGITAL PAINTING TO OIL-VIDEO FUSION AND BACK AGAIN"](https://www.celesteprize.com/indi/_pics/7/2/Hans-fist-good-550_27223_2005.jpg "PAUL BEEL: "FROM PRE-DIGITAL PAINTING TO OIL-VIDEO FUSION AND BACK AGAIN"")
Exhibitions, Italy, Firenze, 17 October 2013
OCTOBER 17 - DECEMBER 12, 2013
OPENING: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 AT 6PM
The paintings in this exhibition span a dynamic 12-year period (2002-2014) during which both humanity and art-making made a major shift from a largely non-digital consciousness to a primarily digital one. Mass use of social media and digital picture-making tools did not yet exist when several of these works were made. The selected paintings and videos, always based on some form of observation, run roughly parallel to the chronological blossoming of digital visual tools and socialization. Traditional oil painting becomes intermixed with digital media in varying but increasingly interwoven ways. Hence the Icons...
Icons “help” us focus our attention to a field or given set of required fields. For many years, Beel signed his paintings with an enigmatic ladybug icon, which often morphed into other bugs, sun beams, and other elements. When conceiving this show, he marked each painting with an icon suggesting its relation to digital means.
Contemporary oil painting for dummies: Each painting has an icon in a corner. This will let you know a little about how that particular painting was made.
The icons are as follows:
· Rectangle with head and shoulders = Skype-painted.
· Camera (opaque) = made with digital camera.
· Camera (outlined) = made with pre-dig camera.
· Eye = painted from life.
· Starburst = painted from imagination.
· Joker = as you like it.
On truth and social media: We have portraits painted from models from life. We have models recruited through copious social networking sitting “live” on Skype. We have paintings painted from life, and those painted from digital photography mixed with video. We see paintings made from memory or imagination after living an experience, digitally recording said experience, then spending half a year looking at hundreds of thousands of frames of that experience while editing a full length film about the experience of painting a traditional oil painting, not to mention studies purely from life. Just as much as the digital social channels and techniques have served to confuse the issue of what we consider real and why we believe it, Beel’s Timeline leaves the viewer to ponder whether its vision has been run through the digital filter, and whether that filtering now makes them more like us or less so.
Paul Beel received his BFA and MFA from the School of Art at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He completed Post-Baccalaureate studies at SACI, where he later taught painting and drawing. He has had solo shows in Venice, Milan, Florence, Mantova, as well as in the US, and group shows in Spain, Germany, San Marino, Switzerland, and throughout Italy. He lives and works in Florence. Paul is represented by Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantova.
www.paulbeel.com
SACI Gallery
Palazzo dei Cartelloni
Via Sant'Antonino, 11
50123 Firenze, Italy
T 055 289 948
Open Monday - Friday, 9am - 7pm
Saturday & Sunday 1pm-7pm
Admission is free
OPENING: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 AT 6PM
The paintings in this exhibition span a dynamic 12-year period (2002-2014) during which both humanity and art-making made a major shift from a largely non-digital consciousness to a primarily digital one. Mass use of social media and digital picture-making tools did not yet exist when several of these works were made. The selected paintings and videos, always based on some form of observation, run roughly parallel to the chronological blossoming of digital visual tools and socialization. Traditional oil painting becomes intermixed with digital media in varying but increasingly interwoven ways. Hence the Icons...
Icons “help” us focus our attention to a field or given set of required fields. For many years, Beel signed his paintings with an enigmatic ladybug icon, which often morphed into other bugs, sun beams, and other elements. When conceiving this show, he marked each painting with an icon suggesting its relation to digital means.
Contemporary oil painting for dummies: Each painting has an icon in a corner. This will let you know a little about how that particular painting was made.
The icons are as follows:
· Rectangle with head and shoulders = Skype-painted.
· Camera (opaque) = made with digital camera.
· Camera (outlined) = made with pre-dig camera.
· Eye = painted from life.
· Starburst = painted from imagination.
· Joker = as you like it.
On truth and social media: We have portraits painted from models from life. We have models recruited through copious social networking sitting “live” on Skype. We have paintings painted from life, and those painted from digital photography mixed with video. We see paintings made from memory or imagination after living an experience, digitally recording said experience, then spending half a year looking at hundreds of thousands of frames of that experience while editing a full length film about the experience of painting a traditional oil painting, not to mention studies purely from life. Just as much as the digital social channels and techniques have served to confuse the issue of what we consider real and why we believe it, Beel’s Timeline leaves the viewer to ponder whether its vision has been run through the digital filter, and whether that filtering now makes them more like us or less so.
Paul Beel received his BFA and MFA from the School of Art at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He completed Post-Baccalaureate studies at SACI, where he later taught painting and drawing. He has had solo shows in Venice, Milan, Florence, Mantova, as well as in the US, and group shows in Spain, Germany, San Marino, Switzerland, and throughout Italy. He lives and works in Florence. Paul is represented by Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantova.
www.paulbeel.com
SACI Gallery
Palazzo dei Cartelloni
Via Sant'Antonino, 11
50123 Firenze, Italy
T 055 289 948
Open Monday - Friday, 9am - 7pm
Saturday & Sunday 1pm-7pm
Admission is free
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