Adam Lister’s ‘8-Bit Watercolors’ Apply Crude Digitization to Masterful Paintings

Share:

The history of painting may seem somewhat cyclical: from the two-dimensional baseness of hieroglyphics to the Renaissance’s perspective-prizing realism to impressionism’s fuck-you to imagistic perfection and back to crudeness with Cubism and Abstract Expressionism’s crusade against form, then back and forth simultaneously with postmodernism’s rehashing of everything, the passing millennia suggest that constant visual evolution spurs a distorted form of death and rebirth. Adam Lister’s 8-Bit Watercolors (spotted via Colossal) include reproductions of iconic paintings and images that deform paintings like Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring by applying early digital visuals to pre-digital works — layering proverbial lens upon proverbial lens. Appearing at once more modern and more antiquated than their imitated subjects, these Nintendo and Atari-inspired paintings reveal the easy conflation of obsolescence and novelty among decontextualized works, subjecting us to a dizzying form of artistic and technological time travel.

Image credit: Adam Lister

Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci

Image credit: Adam Lister

Mona Lisa at the Louvre

Image credit: Adam Lister

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt

Image credit: Adam Lister

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges-Pierre Seurat

Image credit: Adam Lister

Wonder Woman

Image credit: Adam Lister

The Son of Man, René Magrittte

Image credit: Adam Lister

Breaking Bad

Image credit: Adam Lister

Superman

Image credit: Adam Lister

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

Image credit: Adam Lister

Girl With a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer

Image credit: Adam Lister

Sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh

Image credit: Adam Lister

The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci

Image credit: Adam Lister

American Gothic, Grant Wood