In 2012, Australian portraitist (aka WBK: WorksByKnight) Guy Whitby received $10,000 and an exhibition at the Straube Center of New Jersey for winning the Ebu-Arts contest for the best in a genre coined by Winfried Straube"exuberant and enthusiastic". Whitby’s interpretation of the category was to make art from art, creating color splashed composites whose components were themselves small works of art. Granny Squares, another of Whitby’s exhibitions, exemplified this process by amassing miniature images of grandmotherly handicrafts into unlikely versions of The Great Wave at Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai.
Whitby also experimented with buttons, creating very recognizable renditions of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and high resolution pop culture photographs with shockingly few colors:
Whitby’s current leanings towards digital composite portraiture reflects a synergy between his background in traditional art technique and a savvy for leveraging the digital medium by sharing quickfire art over virtually every outlet for digital art possible, and selecting icons with especially high viral potential as his subjects.His more recent pieces, such as a whole series of Nelson Mandela, a collection of authors and poets, and film stills, consist in arrangements of computer keys, symbols, and numbers.
Nelson Mandela
WBK Dinosauria Bukowski 27x37, from Whitby's “Authors and Poets” series.The artist’s Behance portfoliocontains significant written commentary about his intentions, alluding to a youth before computers and the advancement of a “touchscreen dependent” society (making him “reminisce upon the buttons [he] used to push"). Whitby also notes that buttons and keys are not--in and of themselves--unique, and that he enjoys creating meaning out of mass-produced components that are normally forgotten and discarded. But just as nothing lasts forever, he knows that digital fancies are just as fast and fleeting as old buttons.Whitby has thought provoking opinions on modern global society and its effect on the integrity of art, believing that we live in an age “that lacks integrity"--but that his art can still be sincere. He views his use of already existing icons or works of art as a means of “reappropriating the merit” that they already possess, urging viewers to make their own evaluations of his creations.So while buttons and keyboards get thrown into the dumpsters, and people cycle through profusions of digital content only to forget moments later, perhaps WBK’s buttons and keys will enjoy more permanence, sustained by the eye of the beholder.WorksByKnight
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