ric is an American artist based in Traverse City, Michigan. He gained acclaim in 2009 when he won third place for his pushpin portraits in the Inaugural ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His artwork displays a strong sense of play and uses a variety of unorthodox and unconventional everyday life materials including pushpins and Post-It notes. Eric Daigh’s artwork combines creativity along with hours of diligent application. As a process artist, his work starts with taking a series of photographs of his subject. After carefully analyzing the photos, he uses a computer and specialized software to break an image down to a very low resolution and forces the computer to make the image out of only five colours (red, blue, yellow, black and white). He then uses a grid map to show where to stick the pins row by row. At first glance, Daigh’s artwork appears to be a low-resolution portrait, but upon closer inspection, onlookers can see each piece is made up of thousands of colored pins.
Many of his art pieces use over 11,000 pushpins to complete a three-foot by four-foot piece and as many as 25,000 pushpins for a four-foot by six-foot piece. In Summer 2010, Daigh surpassed his own world record by creating a commissioned pushpin piece for automaker Acura, which used 109,687 pushpins.
His artwork combines the use of photography, graphic design and imagination to create a photographic mosaic art piece. His inspiration comes from artist Chuck Close, an American painter and photographer known for his photorealistic massive-scale portraits. Portrait photographer Martin Schoeller also inspired Daigh.
Daigh begins the creation process by taking photographs of a person and then processing those images through a computer program that reproduces them in five colors: “With the push pins, I don’t have every colour in the rainbow to use. It’s a limited color palette,” he explains. “Push pins only come in a few colors.” Daigh gets his multi-colour packs of 500 pins through local retailers. He and his wife, Meghan, sometimes spend their evenings sorting pins into the 5 colours he uses. Push pins don’t come in black, so Daigh has to spray paint green pins to black. After breaking the image down to a low resolution, Daigh produces a row-by-row grid that dictates where each colour pin should be placed to form the image. You can get in touch with him at the link below.
www.daigh.com
