Oscar Hartley
Dulwich High School of Visual Arts and Design
CONNECTION UNAVAILABLE
Painting
Digital painting
My body of work examines the pervasive disconnect between humanity and nature that underscores our digital age. Through my work’s digital medium I have represented a glitch that seems to sweep away the landscape to reveal the underlying hex code. My work subverts the Romantic traditions of Australian landscape painting, conveying the inescapable presence of technology as it infiltrates even a medium inherently opposed to it. By juxtaposing the appearance of traditional texture and brushwork in the painting with digital distortion algorithms, such as pixel sorting, which fragment and dissolve this natural landscape, I communicate our disintegrating connection with nature.
Marker's Commentary
Unfolding across four panels, Connection Unavailable presents a layered narrative exploring the tension between tradition and disruption. Each panel captures a distinct moment in a timeline and a subtle shift in perception. The evocative colour palette underpins the traditions of Romantic landscape depiction of Australia’s East Coast. Mountain ranges fade into a blue-purple haze beneath vast skies, invoking themes of isolation, discovery, and the sublime. In contrast, the foreground features intricate details, dappled light, and movement, grounding the viewer in a tangible natural world. Refined digital technique skilfully mimics the tactile quality of oil paint throughout, exploring foreshortening, aerial perspective, evoking familiar subject matter of Australian Impressionism and considerations of artists such as Streeton and Roberts on Australia’s evolving physical and political landscape.
Moving across the panels, a digital ‘glitch’ emerges, gradually breaking the image’s harmony. This disruption symbolises the intrusion of modernity and humanity’s uneasy relationship with progress and the environment. The glitch appears ephemeral, like refracted light, suggesting speed, distortion, and disconnection, akin to watching the world blur past from a train window, revealing jarring codes and structures that juxtapose convention. The transition from the painterly left panel to the fractured digital forms on the right mirrors a journey from the natural to the artificial. This considered and thoughtful progression marks our loss of connection with the untouched landscape, exposing a desire to access digital connections everywhere. The emerging digital line, threading through the panels, becomes a metaphor for human impact, a drive for control and connectivity, ultimately leaving the landscape transformed and estranged.