Boren Banner Series: Blake Blanco

Classical mythology meets the digital age in Seattle artist Blake Blanco’s Boren Banner. Working first in a virtual reality studio, Blanco creates digital sketches that he then translates into paint on canvas. In this new work developed for the Frye, Blanco takes inspiration from the Italian Renaissance engraving Danae and the infant Perseus cast out to sea by Acrisius (1543). The artist expressively distills his subjects into simplified shapes whose vivid synthetic colors suggest a plastic, rather than organic, world. The project extends Blanco’s ongoing inquiry into what it means to be human in a moment when the boundaries between the natural and the manufactured are increasingly unstable.