#tutsberger

 

In the present state of affairs, due to technical development there are more images produced than there has ever before in history. One has access to capture moments with their smartphones, anytime, anywhere. New media tools, such as Instagram help to share these images with the world within seconds. The result of a overwhelming flood of imagery, one is almost unable to introspectively study these,as a viewer. If anything, the observer is perfunctory consuming this world of imagery.

 

With a certain pessimistic touch of Irony, one can claim that the museums spiritual spaces was replaced through the virtual endless space of the internet.

With my project, I intend to bring back the dignity it deserves. I invited people, to upload personal pictures on Instagram and hashtag (#) them to my pseudonym: tutsberger. My aim and promise was to take these Fotographs and free them from  the the virtual space context and transform them in to large scale Oil paintings.

 

Close to 40 people took their chance to get their moments carpeted, transformed in to a pice of art. The collected Images show a great deal of mixture in Selfies, animal Fotografie, snapshots and landscapes. In other words: the average Instagram-Feeds weren’t significantly different.

 

The night and nightlife, the entertainment when it goes dark outside, was what I found most appealing.The fast nights slowly turning into daytime, the nights that pass by fast and sometimes only reconstructive and memorable moments are captured thanks to a picture one took. The excitement of the peaces of art are gained through contemporary subjects like Party-pictures or food situations, that once upon a time only belonged to royales or clerical dignitaries.

 

With the speed of Light through the internet, images that only survived as little as a few minutes or even seconds, seem to shine for a lifetime and that presented in one of the oldest forms of media in the culture history.

 

I placed value on the common oil painting technique and getting as close to the original way possible. I refused to take the easy way of taking a ready-made stretcher with panels covered with fabric. My decision was the raw cotton fabric „Arles“, wich measurably is heavy and tight and shows a rough structure. I covered the stretcher in cloth and glued it with Hare leather glue. For the primer I chose a to provide a primer for my oil paintings wich I had to prepare the ground during a long process by putting numerous thin layers of chalk primer or half-chalk primer on the canvas panel.

The whole series of the peaces are undercoated with black iron oxide pigment, because, like I mentioned earlier based on pictures wich are taken at night or play in the dark.

 

While painting, I didn’t strictly follow the original fotos. As an artist I took the freedom to influence the content from the new output that followed visual criteria. I did not heavy-hand censorship, the essence of Fotografie remained the same.

 

My palette is reduced to around six colors for each peace of art. For each painting I chose the same pigments of colors for skin tones: Französischer Ocker, Titanweiss, Kadmiumrot und Spinellgrau.

I refused to work with color from the tube, all colors are pigments wich are mixed with llinseed oil and diluted with Balsamterpentinöl.

The first selection of Fotografie is done, more will follow on Instagram: #tutsberger.