Portrait of a Woman_In Search Of was painted from an animation I created from the results of my month-long Google Image Search. Starting with Frank Sydney Spears’s Portrait of Woman as the first Image search, each day I would take the results from the previous days search and enter it again. A bit like a broken telephone, the search became visually more and more removed from its source, yet lead me strangely closer to the artist in another way…

Frank Spears, I discovered, was both a visual artist and radio broadcaster for Springbok radio in the 1950s and 60s in South Africa. The sample (unheard), I selected from the South African Broadcasting Corporation archive turned out to be a fourteen minute radio broadcast, The Painters Art in which Spears talks about fresco painting. The day the disc arrived in the post from the archives in Johannesburg, my Google image search came up with a cracked wall surface as if ready and waiting for the sound I was about to listen to.

The Painters Art. (Frank Spears. 1966. Springbok radion broadcast. SABC archive Johannesburg)

Portrait of a Woman_In search of

acrylic & oil on canvas
680x560mm