Colorado Snow Effect 4 (2007), oil on canvas, 48” x 64”/122cm x 162cm, was only exhibited once at The Nunnery gallery in east London in a solo exhibtion titled Across the Water. It was purchased by friends and has quietly cohabited with them in their apartment - until recently! Some discerning people used photos of zooming into it from my old website and it reached a somewhat larger audience on TikTok and Instagram. After 18 years it has come of age!

Between 2000-2015 I almost exclussively worked with low-quality, low-resolution photos of the Colorado landscape, sourced over the Internet. Initially I worked with photos from the website of another Dan Hays who lives in Colorado. Then I expanded the project, looking at ski-resort and traffic webcam images as well as old postcards of a landscape I never physically visited.

After looking at loads of snowscape photos something seemingly obvious struck me: that on cloudy days the scenes are effectively greyscale. I wondered about trying to paint them in pure saturated colour. On a TV screen this happens with pixels in a mix of red, green and blue light. What about doing this with the whole colour spectrum?

‘Effet de niege’ was part of the title of many of Claude Monet’s snowscenes, experienced and painted first-hand. The blizzard I wanted to depict had more to do with screen technology, both electronic and digital - information overload.

For this painting I chose an image that had a misty and overcast atmosphere of falling snow, and in Photoshop reduced the resolution until the foreground trees still just about registered - 210 x 280 (58,800 pixels). Then I experimented adding noise and pushing the saturation - happy days of tinkering around until it was just right. After dozens of test prints the image was indexed to have 256 individual colours, each made into a separate layer to project onto the canvas, matching colours to a printed swatch.

Painting was a laborious process taking hundreds of hours, which is the case with all my work. You could say that I am like a very slow and low-quality digital printer. Glitches and flaws are inevitable in the process - and essential.

From a distance the painting (and the new print) appears greyscale. As it’s approached colour perception quickly takes over. Pictorial forms dissolve into abstraction. Metaphorical associations of the whiteness of snow with purity, silence and dormancy (death?) are subverted by the exuberant warmth of colour - something that a ‘blanket’ of snow subliminally suggests. To discover each pixel is painted further animates the surface into life.

My paintings aim to present a paradoxical visual realm where shimmering pixels and physical brushstrokes coalesce, confusing optical distinctions between screen and canvas. The seamless perfection and speed of digital technology is slowly translated into comparatively inexact daubs of pigments - organic and synthetic - mixed with linseed oil. In varying degrees, oil paint dries slightly darker or less saturated than the original mix, so it’s all a bit of a juggling act at the thresholds of human visual perception. The the grid-based matrix of an electronic screen echoes the tangible weave of a canvas.

To be clear: I have no claim on the visual or painterly geniuses of Monet or Seurat. All I do is notice and closely study the possibilities of digital image manipulation software, inflected through the optical limitations of paint, with an eye to the narrative potential of this: socio-political, technological or phenomenogical, and - hopefully - emotionally affecting or aesthetically pleasing in some weird kind of way.

This first print has been made in response to many enquiries about purchasing reproductions of my paintings (particularly, yet not exclussively, this one). The size has been chosen to fit a standard frame (16” x 20”) to save on additional costs. But more importantly, this size makes the picture work in a domestic space as the colours only start to merge into greyscale from a distance of around 4 metres. (The original painting needs perhaps 15 metres). Also, the print is large enough to see that the original image is actually a painting on close inspection.

The print number is printed light grey in the bottom right-hand corner - not to distract from the image. I decided not to print my signature bottom left as the image functions as the signature (and it just seemed a bit gauche as I only sign my paintings on the back). The certificate of authenticity will contain a printed signature.

A wooden or metal frame might work better than a stark black one. You decide…

Dan

Detail of the print

2007

2025

Unique edition number (n/256) printed small and faint in the bottom right corner