At first glance, these works appear as painted portraits broken into blocks of colour (part abstraction, part portraiture) Each square of pigment holds part of a face, a moment, or a memory. But behind these paintings is a surprising starting point: every piece begins not with paint, but with pixels. Light Paintings takes the digital language of screens: grids, light, and reduction and rebuilds it into something physical, textured, and deeply human.(albeit if only from a distance)
The project began with a simple challenge: what happens when you break a portrait down into its smallest visual units? Using a 32×32 LED matrix and a beginner’s MicroPython course, I started translating photographs into grids of light. The portraits were reduced to nothing but pixels — tiny squares of colour, stripped of detail yet holding the essence of a face.
Rather than keeping these images trapped in the screen, I brought them back into the physical world. Each painting takes those reduced digital patterns and rebuilds them manually through paint: hue by hue, square by square. What begins as code and pixelation becomes a painted surface, shifting between technology and touch, between precision and imperfection.
The work asks how reduction changes meaning. When we get too close to someone, the image breaks apart. When we pull too far back, the person becomes simplified and fall in to a category, a stereotype, a flattened idea. Light Paintings sits in that in-between space, where identity is both seen and obscured, broken and whole.
As time has move on the work now echos and speaks to how we remember. This is because our digital lives are documented through images that are compressed, filtered, and optimised and then shared before the entire process starts again. that is until they barely resemble the original moment. The more we rely on screens to store and share our experiences, the more those experiences become pixelated. By rebuilding digital fragments through paint, these works ask what gets lost in that process and what might be regained through slowness, craft, and attention.
