Look what happened to my picture!

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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 photos of Van Gogh’s famous chair.

Would the Real Chair please stand up?

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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  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.  However, in the past colour was  hard to get and mostly expensive, and so it was handled and viewed with great care.

Now that has changed, and paint in all colours has become cheap.

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  Lots of red! (Some put ketchup on everything)

In music most people mainly look for sound and tunes, and the more rational verbal content is of minor importance or doesn’t matter at all.

Paradoxically, in pictures most viewers examine the intelligible content, the subject, and how well it is drawn, but do not pay much attention to colour except as a decorative element.

The Madonna by Chagall is at the Thyssen museum in Madrid.

This probably explains why the photos of famous paintings vary so much in colour. Nobody cares.

Maybe it is also why painters like Picasso or Jasper Johns or Warhol could get away with colours that looked a little faded even when the painting was not yet dry enough to be sold.

This post is partly based on The Greatest Artists

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