When I was at The Art Institute of Chicago a couple weeks ago, I saw something new in impressionist paintings. When you get up close to a Monet or Seurat, it’s all a blur (or a bunch of dots), with no discernable form or pattern. These paintings, even the small ones, are best viewed at 6 or 8 or more feet away. And this is the madness and genius of them: How did Monet go about painting something he couldn’t see without backing up a few feet? What the hell is going on here? I picture the artist with a six foot long paintbrush, or with an assistant who does the actual painting while he smokes a cigarette and gives instructions from across the room. Or maybe he had a mirror next to the canvas and another at 3 feet in front of it, so he could quickly see the developing form at a distance.

But of course none of this is true, at least as far as I know. There were no mirrors, there was no smoke. Just Monet at the canvas. I laugh because the Impressionist painters have played a joke on me, the viewer. I can’t dispute how beautiful these paintings are when you do step back and look at them, but I am equally boggled by the technique.

Icon Art also boggles. Take a look at the work of Hide Itoh. Under very severe size and color restrictions, he has created many tiny icons that are beautiful to look at and instantly recognizable as what they represent. You cannot simply take a photograph of a bulldozer and resize it down to the scale of an icon. It would become a blob in the process, and not the kind of blob that looks like anything when viewed from far away (or really small). Instead, the icon artist must decide what is absolutely essential and build, pixel by pixel, the essential reprensentation of the object.

They look great at their intended (tiny) size, but if you enlarge them you’ll see how ridiculous they look on the large scale. There’s something beautiful about the effects of scaling something that scales poorly. Suddenly your attention is on the colors, and the actual object is less important. if you step across the room, though, the cowboy reappears. It takes a special mind to come up with the right combination of pixels in a 20x20 grid such that, when scaled down by 1200%, it’s perfectly recognizable as a cowboy.

Since I’m not an icon artist, I have to find my own way of drawing the effects of scaling out of an innocent object. Here’s an appraoch that Daniel and I came up with over the phone one evening: Photocopy a small (3x6”), simple drawing or some text out of a book (or your own work) and enlarge it to 3’x6’ black and white, then color it in with acrylic paint (or don’t). There is no added detail at the large scale, of course, but all the tiny imperfections of printing and photocopying start to come out. These artifacts of scaling add something, stylistically, that was never intended, and you end up with a new perspective.

Now here’s my challenge to you: Create an 20x20 pixel icon of a Monet painting.