Paint By (phone) Number

Enda O'Donoghue

"Too slutty?" (2010) Oil on Canvas, 140 x 170 cm

"Mistaking the Peplum" (2009) Oil on Canvas, 50 x 60 cm​

"In the Elevator" (2009) Oil on Canvas, 90 x 120 cm

 The images in Enda ODonoghues paintings all come from the Internet. They are all other peoples images, digitally found images. Searching through popular online social networks and blogs on an ongoing basis, he compulsively collects and catalogues photographs that he finds. The photos which he works with are most often the throw-away shots which otherwise gather digital dust buried away on hard-drives, camera chips, mobile phones or uploaded and then lost or forgotten someplace on the Web. With each image he paints he is meticulous about tracing the ownership and requesting permission, partly as a way of dealing with the anonymous nature of the Internet and also a reaction to the issues surrounding online privacy and copyright. 

The process of painting from these images is slow and methodical, firstly dissecting the image into sections on paper and then working over periods of weeks or months to reconstruct the image section by section as a painting. Echoing and playing with the nature digital image processing and compression algorithms, the painting process is highly analytical and methodical and yet filled with randomness and inviting of errors, misalignments and glitches.

www.endaism.com