[ISEA2006] Artist Statement: Clive McCarthy — A Painting Performance

Artist Statement

Presented by The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
Saturday, August 12th 2006 at 8:30pm on South First Street between San Salvador and William. The performance will conclude at approximately 10:30pm including three intermissions.

A group of artists will paint a twelve-foot by eight-foot canvas using a limited color palette working from a series of vivid projected images while the Del Sol String Quartet performs works by George Antheil and other composers.

The performance is part of the closing celebration for the ISEA2006 symposium and ZeroOne Festival

  • Engineer turned artist, Clive McCarthy writes his own code to recreate painterly versions of his own photographs. Juggling three mediums in the process, McCarthy’s final abstract renderings are mind-bending. McCarthy spends most of his time researching master painters’ techniques in order to reproduce a specific brush stroke as an example. Coding is McCarthy’s brush and his “paint” is entirely synthetic. A digital version of a painting of a photograph is happening in slow motion however never to materialize as the program works in random sequence indefinitely.  [source: currentsnewmedia.org/artist/clive-mccarthy]

A Painting Performance is funded in part by Applied Materials Excellence in the Arts: a program of Arts Council Silicon Valley and a grant from the Fleishhacker Foundation.