The Pushpin Artwork of Eric Daigh

Artist Eric Daigh makes mosaics with pushpins. His primary subject matter is portraiture. Daigh begins the creation process by taking photographs of a person and then processing those images through a computer program that reproduces them in five colors:

“With the push pins, I don’t have every color in the rainbow to use. It’s a limited color palette,” he explains. “Push pins only come in a few colors.”

Daigh gets his multi-colored packs of 500 pins through local retailers. He and his wife, Meghan, sometimes spend their evenings sorting pins into the five colors he uses. Push pins don’t come in black, so Daigh has to spray paint green pins to black.

After breaking the image down to a low resolution, Daigh produces a row-by-row grid that dictates where each color pin should be placed to form the image. Daigh then places the pins, one-by-one, following the grid map. It takes some 11,000 push pins to complete one of his 3×4-foot works.

Gallery and Article via The Presurfer | Photo: Eric Daigh

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You may or may not call it art. It does reflect, express a condition of our times, the reduction of the complexity of life to simplistic, basic terms that mean almost nothing in themselves, but gain some value only in relation to other equally simplistic basic elements. Like shallow, common, identical people vying for our attention, individually unremarkable, but seen as a larger group, these people define our "culture" of meaningless, empty star worship. Each push pin can be seen as a plain, boring individual that plays a small, almost insignificant role in making up the mosaic of our self obsessed, "YouTube everything" society. Occasionally an individual differentiates "itself", but only superficially. Like the difference between a yellow or red push pin. Were all just push pins, as long as we model ourselves on plastic people.