Dan Hays
Dan Hays came to public attention first with his paintings of guinea pigs. In 1997 he won the John Moores Painting Prize with his painting of a seductive, oversized, empty hampster cage, “Harmony in Green”.
Between 1996–98 Dan Hays painted eight cages. These were optical explorations of the contrast of the illusionistic cage against a flat background. During this process he constructed a 3D computer model of the original hamster cage to allow him to play with and later adapt it to accommodate colour.
“Cages are ambiguous objects. They both confine and protect. They are a simple metaphor for the human condition or the creative process.”
By a process of trial and error Hays discovered the possibilities of lenticular technology. He then wanted to subvert the technology with animated and 3D elements competing – a logical extension of what happens in the paintings.
“Rendering the image in pastoral greens and blues for Sanctuary contrasts with the sinister connotations of a cage as something that separates the occupant from nature.”
Dan Hays
Spring Snow
Edition: 65
Materials: screen-print on Velin Arches Blanc paper
Size: 70.5 x 89 cm
Launch price: £450 plus VAT
Spring Snow continues Dan Hays’ exploration into ways that snow-covered landscapes can be represented. Under a grey sky, snow scenes are so often rendered colourless, yet over the past few years he has been painting them with points of pure, saturated colour. From a distance these scenes optically merge to form a grey-scale image. At closer range, however, colour perception takes hold, creating “an impression of abstracted coloured noise”.
Spring Snow is a scene in two halves: both a snow-covered landscape depicted with black and white pixels (a nod to digital reproduction) and its reflection in a lake rendered using familiar half-tone colour separation techniques, pushed into perspective, and without the usual black component.
Subverting the Impressionist and Pointillist use of additive colour, Spring
Snow makes reference to the noise or ‘snow’ between the channels as well as to Monet’s water-lily paintings. Rosettes of pure colour viewed on the lake’s surface coalesce into a grey-scale snow scene from a distance.
‘Getting the colour balance right required many experiments and, even now, natural and artificial lighting can vary the perception of the work. Spring Snow is necessarily flawed, a futile representation of nature, a constructed technological sublime complete with the associations of hope, memory and loss that this brings.’
