What started as simply as taking pictures, which I wasn’t supposed to do, turned into a reflection of our current social media seduced society juxtaposed on what became a series of works called “SOcial media in the Golden Age.” My wife and I were in Europe. This was my first visit and we started in Paris and ended in Amsterdam. And wherever we visited we tried to stop into the art museums. In Paris we began at the Musee d’Orsay and we ended with the Hermitage in Amsterdam. At the d’Orsay I snapped a photo of “The Birth Of Venus” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and others. At the Van Gogh I took pictures of “Un coin de table” by Henri- Fatin Latour (1836 - 1904), as well as “Portrait de Mille Charlotte Dubourg”, “Le pal de l’Opéra” by Henri Gervex (1852-1929) and many more. All along the process the facial recognition software on my phone was trying to identify the faces in these masterful paintings.

When we visited the Hermitage we walked into the Great Hall featuring enormous paintings of the aristocracy of the Golden Age, many created by Franz Hals, a contemporary of Rembrandt. Many of the room sized works featured as many as thirty life sized depictions of the who’s-who of that era. If you were a person of stature or royalty, you were honored if included in one of these amazing painted portraits of life in the Netherlands. Dukes and Duchesses, Governors and Governesses, members of the Archers Guild and Royal Guard, financiers, significant merchants and anybody who was anybody would be honored and revered if captured in one of these works.

I thought it poignantly comical that my modern day technology was trying to figure out who all of these long dead Dutchmen were. So when I returned to Fort Worth I took some of the choice images and had them replicated on canvas. Then I added the facial recognition rectangle in oil paint as my artist narrative on the whole adventure. I placed each work in what looks to be an elaborate gold guided baroque styled frame, but what is which actually a faux finished polyurethane blown-foam replica made in China. A fitting modern-day exclamation point to my interpretation of how disposable and temporary our modern image capture and aesthetic archival means are. We barely look at the millions of images we are bombarded by daily, but each and every detail found in these paintings gave definition of who these people were, what they did and how important they were in their society.

The point of this series is that, although painted originally by artists over a century ago it captured in a very specific moment in time. This was my first trip to Europe and my first encounter with an original work by many of these great masters. I snapped the image and noticed for the first time my iPhone placing a facial recognition box around the faces. This was the exact moment that the series “Social Media In The Golden Age” was born.