Look what they done to my picture ! July 1, 2009
Posted by cantueso in art, history, painting, photography.trackback
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… Look at Google photos of famous paintings and compare their colours.There are never two alike. Sometimes they vary so much that you would think the painter made different versions of his work. Yet most people don’t seem to mind.***
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Here is the Google page with more photos of Van Gogh’s famous chair. Which would be more similar to the original ?
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In the more distant past painters had to prepare their own colours. They used semi-precious stones and different kinds of clay plus secret ingredients they did not let anybody know. They applied those onto the fresh wet lime of their walls (which is why the technique is called al fresco). Later they found out how to mix their colour particles with egg to paint on wood. And even more recently they invented the oil paints to paint on cloth, but in the past colour was always hard to get and mostly expensive, and so it was handled and viewed with great care.
Now that has changed.
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In music most people mainly look for the sound and the tune, and the subject is of minor importance.
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Conversely, in pictures most viewers examine the subject and how it is drawn and do not pay attention to colour.
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This probably explains why the photos of famous paintings vary so much in colour. Maybe it is also why like Picasso or Jasper Johns or Warhol could get away with colours that looked a little faded or feeble even when the painting was not yet dry enough to be sold.
The Madonna by Chagall is at the Thyssen museum in Madrid.
This post is partly based on The Greatest Artists
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Color does not really exist, but results from the interaction of light reflected from an object with the chemo-physical properties of our eyes so that there may be a difference in the way different people see color. Looking for information on the net I found this:
“We can’t really say for sure, but we do know enough about the anatomy, physiology, and psychology of vision to be quite certain that we are seeing things the same way. However, this ultimately becomes a question of philosophy … do you believe that the experience I have when viewing red is the same as the experience you have when viewing red??? There is no way to prove it one way or the other. That said, there are small physiological differences between people that cause slight differences in color perception. These are particularly noticeable when making critical color matches.”
Nice observations Chartwell.
It is rather startling to look at all those little jpegs of the same van Gogh chair painting! They look so different. But consider that there’s no way of knowing how many times the data from the light reflecting off the original was focused, processed, and reprocessed before it landed on the web page and then to your screen. For accuracy the only way is to observe the original and even then, as Chartwell notes, each individual’s observations will be unique.