The plywood canvas received a gesso base, and an impressionist style landscape painting was painted as a first layer to provide texture and depth of colour. A white coat followed which we “stressed”, revealing patches of the underlying landscape painting. Papp was then portrayed with a nod towards Malevich: as a square, floating or falling towards the left lower corner of the painting. Instead of Malewich’s white square we chose a yellow close to the famous skin tones used in the Simpsons. As a final touch we dripped and splashed high gloss black as a last layer to give that flair of “Pollockesque” expressionism. At completion the canvas had taken a journey through history starting with a 1700s base coat, an 1800s layer of impressionism, an early 1900s avant garde Suprematism style iconography and ending up in our own mix of cartoonish pop culture and 1960s action painting in the final layer,

Papp is an interactive sculpture so our goal was to make a living portrait. We built in a Raspberry Pi, and hid a pinhole video camera inside one of the smaller drops of black paint, running face recognition and face tracking software. The portrait was programmed to follow faces with its eyes, switch to a different person after a few seconds and to prioritise the faces of children. Two eye lids animated the portrait further, both as a blinking effect and to hide the eyes for longer periods.