SM1701 Research Blog Post #2

SM1701 Research Blog Post #2

September 23, 2025

Topic: The Paintings of Pieter Schoolwerth

Student name: Chan Hiu Wing, Winwin

Student number: 59465381

Pieter Schoolwerth is an artist who love complex compositions combining drawn, printed, painted pictorial elements and computer generated imagery. 

For my research this week, I focused on his artwork "Personality Inventory 7" in 2019. In this painting, he presents a vibrant and chaotic composition with overlapping layers. The colors are very rich and striking in this canvas too, with bright yellows, deep blues and vivid reds which clashed together but at the same time simultaneously harmonized.  The painting is distorted, I can feel the complexities of identity and self-perception in it. This reflected that Schoolwerth given multifaceted and complexed  emotions and personalities in this drawing. The use of fragmented shapes and bold lines also created a sense of ambiguity, revealing the fluidity of personality.

The painting effectively presented the qualities of a digital image through its layered textures and visual fragmentation. The distortion of "Personality Inventory 7" merged the style of glitch aesthetics, which is  a common characteristic in digital visuals.

Moreover,  the vibrant colors and the composition evoke the immediacy of digital consumption, where images are rapidly processed. The painting wants audiences to engage with the critical thinking that ---- as digital images can be curated and reshaped, our perceptions of personality and identity can  be fluid and evolving too.