Facebook profiles endure with artist's touch

By Solarina Ho

TORONTO (Reuters) - What compels the 70 million active Facebook users to pick -- or not to pick -- a particular profile picture?

"It's this aspect that people choose this one image that really fascinates me," said New York-based artist, Paul Campbell, who has an upcoming exhibition in Toronto called Facebook Profiles II.

"They're essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online."

The exhibition at the Drabinsky Gallery in Yorkville, from June 14 to July 12, will explore choice and intimacy in a digital world.

Campbell captures the spirit of the small social-networking profile pictures in his larger-than-life portrait paintings.

The giant portraits, which average about 142 by 142 centimeters (56 by 56 inches) are somewhat of a departure for Campbell, who over the past two decades has been better known for his abstract paintings.

The artist began his Facebook series eight months ago and has done about a dozen portraits, each with its own story.

One such painting is "Brad," an image of a conductor with his arms outstretched on a beach.

"Everyone in my son's class is on Facebook, so I did a Facebook search for my own high school class, and there was one person," Campbell said. "It was Brad, who I hadn't spoken to for 40 years or something, but it was such a great image, I just had to do it."

Facebook may or may not exist in a few years, Campbell said, but paintings are fairly archival. Still, when one of his younger subjects enthused he'd been "immortalized" in a portrait, Campbell said that was a "bit of an overstatement."

"But there's something about the permanence in the association of painting, in taking this really transient image on the Internet."

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)