PAINTING IN PIXELS
I had the chance to sit down with Dan Hays, whose work has been making waves online, captivating a range of subcultures with his distinct painting style. From afar, Dan’s pieces—like Daisyworld 2.0 and Suspension—mimic the glitchy visuals of a 90s CRT TV. But up close, what appears digital is actually an incredibly detailed and precise painting, leaving viewers wondering whether they’re looking at a photo or a canvas. There’s a kind of magic in his work that forces you to pause—a rare moment in today’s fast-paced world. In this conversation, we dive deeper into Dan’s mind, exploring the intentionality behind these mesmerizing, reality-bending creations.
KYLE MCKENZIE (KM): DAN, REFLECTING BACK ON YOUR CHILDHOOD, WHAT WERE THE FORMS OF CREATIVITY YOU FOUND YOURSELF DRAWN TO? HOW DO THESE EARLY EXPERIENCES RESONATE IN YOUR ART TODAY?
DAN HAYS (DH): I loved drawing as a young child, and at primary school wrote: “when I grow up, I want to be an artist and have every colour in the world.” This sure resonates as I’ve mixed and matched tens of thousands of colours in my time.
Origami became an obsession, and I playfully like to think of its foundational square of paper having a relationship to my pixel-based existence. Later, I became completely absorbed in studying the work of M. C. Escher. His tesselations and skewed perspectives reverberate through my work in some way. Family friends had several prints of works by Paul Klee on their walls. Their strangeness left a lasting impression. In my teens, my creative impulses were drawn to usual things like Sci-Fi and Dungeons & Dragons, spending hours designing and drawing worlds and monsters.
This commitment to projects and attention to detail went into overdrive when I received a Sinclair ZX81 computer for Christmas, aged 15.
"...when visiting my mum last week, she had fished out a bag full of school exercise books she had kept from my childhood. I found the page where I talk about wanting to be an artist when I grow up."
KM: COULD YOU SHARE WITH ME WHAT YOUR 'WHY' IS FOR YOU AND HOW IT SHAPES YOUR APPROACH TO WHAT YOUR PAINTINGS?
DH: That’s a hard question to answer, especially as I’m presently asking ‘why?’ as I search for the next project after finishing a four year one. Something has to grip me visually, conceptually and emotionally, and offer a new technical challenge. Chance encounters can play a massive role.
There’s a ‘what if?’ or ‘will this work?’ element, which always seems to require something slightly absurd and ridiculously labour-intensive. Once I’m immersed in the painting process, after extensive digital manipulations, the question ‘why?’ melts away.
Of course, I can look back at many paintings now and ask ‘why did I do that?’ But collectively, it all seems to make sense (on a good day). It feels like the paintings asked to be painted – I had no choice.
KM: I REALLY LIKE THAT. THE ACT OF "ALLOWING" YOUR PAINTINGS HAVE A MIND OF THEIR OWN.
WHAT ARE SOME THINGS THAT KEEP YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT LIFE X CREATION?
DH: Very simply, it’s about being able to make art, being lucky enough to have that privilege. Recently, I had to vacate my studio for three months due to building work, and I was utterly lost.
Exhibitions occasionally lift my spirits. Listening to music. I teach in two art colleges and the creative energy of the students fills me with hope. Family and friends. Complete strangers being interested and asking questions about my work.
KM: WELL SAID. RECENTLY A LOT OF STRANGERS HAVE BEEN GRABBING HOLD OF YOUR WORK OVER INSTAGRAM. YOUR WORK HAS BEEN POPPING UP ON INSTAGRAM FOR ME CONSECUTIVELY (NO JOKE) FOR THE LAST 6 MONTHS… HEARING THAT, HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL THAT YOUR WORK IS BEING SHARED ACROSS THE WORLD?
DH: I had no idea my work was popping up on Instagram in the way you mention. I avoid being distracted too much by social media – it’s part of what my work is trying to communicate, I guess. But then, I’ve had a flurry of emails over the last few weeks, enquiring about my work with some lovely comments (including you). Of course, the idea of reaching an even wider audience fills me with happiness. However, a screen is an ironic place to encounter my paintings! Oh well.
2017, oil on canvas, 195 x 195cm
KM: IS THERE A PARTICULAR SERIES OR PROJECT THAT HOLDS A SPECIAL PLACE FOR YOU? WHAT ABOUT IT EXCITES OR FULFILLS YOU THE MOST?
DH: I guess it might be my ‘snow’ works. Hitting on the idea of trying to paint grey snow scenes in pure saturated colour. Of course, this happens whenever a B&W movie is screened on a colour monitor.
I found something magical, painting at low resolutions. From a distance, the picture appears to be made of cold greyscale tones. Then as you approach colour perception takes over and the distinct forms in the image dissolve into a riot of lively brushstrokes/pixels.
2007, oil on canvas, 122 sx 162cm
KM: IN THE REALM OF RECENT WORKS, IS THERE ANYTHING YOU'RE CURRENTLY WORKING ON THAT PARTICULARLY ENERGIZES OR CHALLENGES YOU? COULD YOU FILL US IN ON SOME PROJECTS YOU'VE BEEN WORKING ON IN YOUR STUDIO?
DH: Four years ago, I was approached by an experimental filmmaker, Armand Tufenkian, wondering if I’d be interested in some kind of collaboration. Over several months each year he has been volunteering as a fire lookout in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, filming in and around two lookout cabins. His interest has been in the phenomenon of smoke in the landscape, and I guess in the materiality of 16mm film and painting.
He had seen my work in a book and online, and thought I might be interested. I was initially unsure about returning to another US landscape remotely.
However, the lookout cabins each have several webcams, which he linked me to, and inevitably I was drawn into exploring this archive of thousands of images, stretching back over a decade. In 2015 a huge fire that raged for months nearly burnt down one of the lookouts. The webcam footage grows increasingly apocalyptic, the landscape choked with smoke as the fire approaches over many days.
Making overtly political paintings about the climate emergency, however much I believe in its ravages, was something my paintings have tried to avoid to some degree, like disaster tourism. But then the poor, low-resolution webcam footage speaks of this technological separation, and the various pixelated techniques across the nine paintings (nearly completed), hopefully work to draw the viewer in as the pictures dissolve into varieties of digital and painted artifacts.
A particulate technological smokescreen. Armand has visited London three times to film me working in the studio – another screen between the viewer and the landscape.
2014, oil on canvas, 150 x 200cm
2014, oil on canvas, 150 x 200cm
KM: COLORADO AS A SUBJECT IS INTERESTING DESPITE NEVER HAVING VISITED, WHICH IS INTRIGUING [...]
DH: Colorado chose me! In 1999, I hooked up to the Internet for the first time, and one of the first things I did was to put my name in a search engine. I found another Dan Hays in Colorado with his own website, mostly documenting the spectacular Rocky Mountain landscapes around his home. I had just started making paintings informed by screen technology and pixelation, and the low-resolution images on his website had astonishing compression artefacts and exaggerated colours. With his permission – “my images are your images” – a fifteen-year project commenced with an alter-ego who got the joke.
[Early into the project, Colorado Dan emailed a photo of himself to London Dan, which became the basis of the painting Dan Hays/Self-Portrait (after Dan Hays Colorado), 2005, oil on canvas, 76 x 203cm at the top of this page]
A few years into the project I started exploring webcam networks across Colorado, mostly ski resort and traffic webcams, and purchasing vintage postcards over the Internet. Most of the paintings are 4x3 rectangles, the standard dimension for video at the time. Geographically, Colorado is a giant 4x3 rectangle, and incorporates the word ‘color’. It became a mythic land that I inhabited through low-quality images and hundreds of hours painting. Going there imaginatively and virtually, rather than physically speaks to a form of romanticism – a longing for something lost, the sublime notion of wilderness that painting can only attempt to capture, and the visitor can barely grasp. The Hudson River School painters became a group of artists I found myself in curious relation to. Their heroic expeditions were poorly echoed by my seated excursions into the Internet and across the canvas.
oil on canvas, 120x160cm, 2021
KM: THAT'S CRAZY! WHAT DO YOUR METHODS SAY ABOUT YOUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY AND VIRTUALITY?
DH: When I started using low quality digital images, it became clear to me that low-resolution pixelation and compression artifacts suggested the brush techniques and use of additive colour in Impressionism.
The aims of both impressionist painting techniques and digital image compression are to capture the essence of a scene as economically as possible. It’s with playful irony that my paintings take hundreds of hours to translate an image that can be copied or distributed in microseconds.
The cold surveillance eyes of landscape webcams offer a glimpse into a largely unmediated world in terms of pictorial composition, being there to relay fluctuating information about the weather rather than a picturesque view. Again, this echoed impressionist approaches, thinking especially of Monet’s returns to the same subjects in different light conditions.
2000, oil on canvas, 45 x 60cm
2006, oil on canvas, 137 x 183cm
KM: IN YOUR LIFE, WHAT IS AN EXPERIENCE THAT AFFECTED YOUR LIFE?
DH: My dad worked in the television industry, so perhaps I had a heightened sensitivity to the domestic screen when I was little. It’s where he spent most of his time. He moved to France to open a guest house with his second wife in 1990. The pine-clad mountain valley in the Auvergne region has become a landscape I know well, especially loving it when it snows. Of course, there’s a relationship to some of the Colorado scenery.
KM: AS A PARENT YOURSELF - IN AN ERA WHERE ART AND AI ARE INCREASINGLY INTERTWINED, HOW DO YOU NAVIGATE THE CONTROVERSIES AND BOUNDARIES IN THIS NEW LANDSCAPE?
DH: I am very disturbed by seemingly exponential advances in AI, and fear AGI (artficial general intelligence) is an imminent threat to humanity. Some of my students are increasingly experimenting with AI text and image generators and I have been astonished by the results.
In seven years when my daughter might be going to university, what will the world of learning look like?
What jobs will be left that AI can’t do more efficiently, or better even?
This includes the creative industries. I am chilled thinking about it,
and don’t have an answer.
1997, oil on canvas, 171 x 246cm
KM: WHERE IMAGERY IS OFTEN DISTORTED OR LOW-RESOLUTION YOUR ART SEEMS TO COMMENT ON THE DIGITAL AGE. HOW DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR WORK REFLECTS OR CRITIQUES THIS RELATIONSHIP WE HAVE WITH TECHNOLOGY?
DH: My art is increasingly anachronistic.
Even back in 2000, the digital images I was drawn to painting were at the poorest, low-resolution, heavily compressed end of the spectrum. Amazing glitches abounded. Imaging technology is now reaching a level of transparent perfection that we are barely aware of the screen interface.
Of course, there’s a nostalgia for old vision technologies that algorithms can happily simulate, and my work echoes this desire. It’s the instantaneous accessibility of any image, any place over the Internet that perhaps troubles me most profoundly. The Internet has no horizon or night time. To spend hundreds of hours with a low-resolution, poor-quality image speaks to a continually distracted world where such attention is virtually impossible.
Low-resolution images invite imaginitive projection, for the visual cortex to work to fill in the blanks. There are huge experiential differences between the painted surface and the electronic screen in terms of materiality and visual interaction. A screen emits light, a painting reflects incident light. Screens are totally flat and innumerably various, whereas paintings have a tangible surface and are singular. Ideally, my paintings confuse these distinctions, with the hope of reconciling them somehow. I consider the weave of a canvas to be akin to the pixelated matrix of the screen.
2009, oil on canvas
122 x 163cm
KM: YOUR ART SEEMS TO RESONATE BEYOND ITS IMMEDIATE SUBJECT, TOUCHING ON BROADER THEMES LIKE SUBURBAN LIVING AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC FRAMEWORKS. HOW DO THESE WIDER SOCIETAL ISSUES INFLUENCE YOUR CHOICE OF SUBJECTS AND ARTISTIC APPROACH?
DH: I hope my work always resonates beyond its immediate subjects, but I’m only really guided by hunches and being visually drawn to particular things and how I might paint them. Suburbia is where most people live in the UK, and my excursions into it with the Letchworth project was relatively brief. Broadly, the wider societal issues that all my work touches on are to do with our relationship to nature or landscape from our increasingly estranged perspectives.
The idea of slowing down when contemplating anything in our media-saturated age. My work might seem to present, I guess, a Zen-level version of this. But heck, I have a lovely time listening to music or the radio as I toil away semi-robotically (‘semi’ because I’m prone to human imperfections, manual and visual, which is the whole point). Awareness of our human subjectivity, the beautiful interweaving of imperfect vision, visual memory, and mobile encounter, is something my work hopes to encourage (this is true of all painting in a general sense).
2007, oil on canvas, 41 x 64cm/51 x 51cm
(A)CONVERSATION with DAN HAYS -
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