Facsimile of Art

The first time I saw Hopper's Night Hawks I couldn't help but think of the great injustice the reproductions of this piece were -- that I had seen all my life. The squint of green on the original was a green like no other I'd ever seen.

I had never considered an original piece to be so different visually from reproductions. The actual piece was way better than I could have ever imagined -- and though the subject was unmistakably the image firmly rooted in my mind -- it was so much more. I could understand the 'greatness' of this piece, where as previously I never quite got what all the fuss was about.

Today there seems to a bit of an opposite problem. A number of the original pieces I have acquired on-line have paled a bit in comparison to the facsimile delivered by my monitor. In fact all but one of the pieces I have purchased have actually looked better on my computer. There is a luminosity that my monitor delivers that the actual piece seems to lack.

I have even noticed this in my own art attempts. An acrylic painting that I had been struggling with, looked so much better photographed and photo shopped a bit on my computer that it actually inspired me to go back to the original painting and give it a darker tonal wash -- things I may have been afraid of doing permanently to the original piece, I first tried out on my computer and this gave me confidence to go ahead and make improvements.

All the pieces that I have acquired that didn't look nearly as good as their on-line representation -- I've grown to love them for the aspects that make them different from what I first envisioned them to be, (it tends to be in the color palette.) Only one of the pieces was I pretty disappointed with in terms of how the colors were registered on my monitor -- shades of blue and taupe that ended up being school bus yellow. I think sometimes artist make adjustments to their on-line art images, trying to adjust their monitor to better reflect what they see... but given the wide variety of computer systems and hardware out there -- they can't possibly take into account how things will look across the net.

I'm including the computer altered image of the painting I was working on, that inspired me to go back and alter the painting.