Digital Meets Traditional: Painting by Michiel Van Der Zanden
Recreation #4, oil and acrylic on canvas
Michiel Van Der Zanden’s paintings and sculptures are a bizarre marriage of realistic painting and computer generated imagery. Van Der Zanden frequently uses a computer modeling program to compose the sketches for his paintings, taking real objects and settings and isolating them in an uncanny digital space, where the laws of physics and architecture seem somehow less rigid than in reality.
Recreation #3, acrylic and oil on canvas
A Netherlands native, Van Der Zanden’s paintings frequently use familiar buildings or landmarks as their subject matter – but these are more than simple landscape or cityscape paintings. Van Der Zanden doesn’t just use a modeling program to compose scenes – he exploits the otherworldly capabilities of such a program to isolate objects in blank space, and then holds true to the models he creates when he produces his acrylic and oil paintings. The result is paintings that have a look that can only be seen in a computer program, and Van Der Zanden’s skill at rendering smooth objects and softly blurred yet seemingly endless backgrounds make the juxtaposition all the more jarring.
