5: Jones and the painted QR code

Trevor Jones

Raeburn, 2012

Oil on canvas, 90cm x 90cm

On the artist's website: TrevorJonesArt.com

And a final take on QR art, with the painting above part of a series by the artist. Jones' explanation as follows:

I started researching QR codes in 2011 initially to use them to try to help promote my Poem of Ecstasy exhibition on flyers but, as time went on, I began to wonder if I could actually paint these strange looking wee squares so that they could be scanned. It took quite some time to figure out how to create my series of 90 x 90 cm QR code oil paintings and get them to "work" and I spent a lot of time in the studio with a paint brush in one hand and my smartphone in the other. I began incorporating 30% error correction into the QR codes so I could actually be quite creative with the tone and application of thick, impasto paint. There was also the technological challenge of building a website with an online gallery accessed via the paintings that any artist in the world could upload their own artwork to. The project finished with almost 500 works of art uploaded to the gallery by artists from 27 different countries.