Peter Stanick explains, “the internet and working with digital images has a direct, even immediate influence on my way of thinking.” To Stanick, who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and trained as a painter, it became clear to him years ago that the future was in the digital world through the world wide web, and that he could and wanted to use the infinite world of images to be found there for his artistic ends.
Already inspired during his art studies by Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein, Stanick looked for the possibility to not only digitally edit or enhance existing images in color or form, but to create a visual language that was digital from the outset. Today he has succeeded in making his work exist first digitally, in the online world before existing in the form of a painting or as a LUMAS produced photographic series. The sources of his inspiration are websites. To begin he searches above all for formally exciting images; images that attract him in their composition. The result is often that Stanick simplifies, appropriates the images for his own purposes in order to emphasize them for our perception as observers. This creative “cleaning process” of existing and found images does not always work equally well. When certain figures come out as too simplistic, Stanick intervenes in the opposite way and adds certain elements or colors until he is satisfied with the effect of the image.
Through this work method, Stanick’s website is a virtual studio where observant visitors can follow daily, sometimes even hourly, updates, as if present during the artist’s work process. The website www.stanick.com thus works like an artwork, as a “work-in-progress” and laboratory, where images are created, edited and, in a new digital method, “virtually painted” in front of everybody. Stanick is one of the few artists who is consequently committed to the digital process and produces immediately accessible works, which with its Pop Art-forms and colors enrich our analogue spaces.
