Purdon’s Reclamation series emerges as a rigorously conceived investigation into the fault lines between analogue craft and digital procedure—one that honors the past, interrogates our present, and ushers in the next chapter of artistic evolution.
In the mid 1990s, at a moment when “digital art” was all but proscribed from gallery walls, Purdon found himself mired in a singular tension. Possessing equal familiarity of traditional drawing, painting, and nascent digital animation, he was compelled to veil his pixel-born visions beneath layers of mixed media so that each work could command space and value in the physical realm. It is this very subterfuge—his personal “purgatory”—that catalyzes the series’ conceptual force.
Technically, Purdon’s process is exacting: he generates a suite of large scale fully developed canvases in pursuit of painterly “moments”—those fleeting instants of chromatic, textural insight. He then digitizes these fragments and meticulously maps them as high-resolution textures onto a three-dimensional skull form -where they are rendered using computational power to simulate complex light simulations through mathematical modeling and realistic visual effects to create a unique image. These one of one images are either rendered to scale or hand painted using the rendered image as the subject. The resulting objects are neither mere sculptures nor paintings but hybrid artifacts that fuse classically trained techniques with the discipline of contemporary new-media practice.
Symbolically, the skull serves as both memento mori and totem of transformation. It indexes the historical shift from Industrial Revolution labor to today’s code-driven economy, becoming a material chronicle of our era’s pivot toward machine-mediated experience. Collectors and curators encountering these works perceive immediately their dual currency: visceral pleasure in the adumbrative painterly surface and intellectual engagement with their post-internet discourse.