A VISUAL ANOMALY BY NICHOLAS KEYSE

Nicholas Keyse depicts scenes of New Zealand's unique alpine forest in his Simulacra pieces. Nicholas's passion for back country hiking in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, has lead him to some spectacular sights but one scene that he has encountered many times in his travels is a scene where light has penetrated the canopy, within an ordinary forest scene, creating a unique mystical atmosphere. This anomaly appears when the shape of the valley, accompanying river and forest perfectly align with where the sun is held in the sky. After photographing these scenes Nicholas has endeavoured to recreate the feel and mood through oil painting.

The scenes depict the forest in a very high contrasting manner. The sun which faces the camera generated over exposed light areas and very dark shadow, but not much inbetween. Nicholas uses a black and white palette as the scenes colourings seemed unsaturated and washed out due to light glare. To recreate the fine dabbled light projected onto the regenerating scrub, and organic shapes in the details, Nicholas developed a technique by dabbing a thick layer of paint onto a canvas, painting a contrasting colour on top of it and then sanding the paint once dry to reveal the sharp organic lines underneath.

While trying to perfect his technique, Nicholas found that the more you painted to exactly what was in reality the more the image looked incorrect. In a lot of cases people saw different scenes due to the high contrast differentiation between the light and dark of the scene. Nicholas found that if the viewer was given only just enough information to form a sense of a the scene, the brain would then fill in the gaps making the viewer see what they wanted to see. 

Nicholas is inducing Pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists. This results in the viewer being more satisfied in the artist depiction of a scene.

Fractals are everywhere in nature. Patterns reoccurring in different scales. When trying to paint forest scene Nicholas has forced perspective by the difference in scales within his unique painting techique.