Watercolour on a screen
How does it affect us that we these days most often see paintings on a flat screen with a fixed format and size on a fixed viewing distance? I have been mulching over this for quite a while and decided to create a post to get any one elses input on the subject.
Painting on paper is analogue. The process is tactile and direct as experience and the resulting output, if we are lucky, is a real physical object. We can hang it on the wall in our home or in a gallery, but more often than not it seems to end up digitized on a social media site where others can enjoy it via their own choice of viewing device.
This is not a rant against social media culture, but a contemplation over what this "screen publishing" of art work does to us both as artists and viewers. Does it matter that the original size and texture of the painting gets squeezed or expanded into the size of an ipad screen, or even a smart phone? How is the viewing experience affected by the constant viewing distance. Hanging on the wall you can get close to study brush work or back off to get a full impression of colours. On the screen I often find paper grain too obtrusive on a small size painting. And a delicate brushstroke enlarged four times is not the same as in real life. A large part of my own fascination for watercolour is about the analogue and tactile qualities of the media. I appreciate the fact that so much fantastic work of great artists is within reach on my ipad, but the experience leaves me without important clues like size, impact and texture.
Any other thoughts on this subject would be most interesting.
A very interesting question. Digital and printed copies of artworks provide a way to show those works to a large number of people and to go into detail about their creation and meaning, a largely intellectual exercise, perhaps. But nothing digital can match the visceral sensations of standing in front of a real work of art. Since I was very young I've been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci. I explored his life and works in print and online and watched every programme and film I could find about him. I felt (I was young) that I 'understood' him fairly well. In, I think, 2010, I was in Warsaw for work and the Royal Castle was exhibiting 'Lady with Ermine', which had recently been brought to Poland. It was shown in a sort of tent in a large room, with a roped walkway to approach it. There were no other artworks nearby. When I entered the room, the attendant was just leaving and there was no one else there. For 15 minutes I was alone just centimetres from this painting, looking up close at brushmarks made 500 years before, standing back to see the forms, the values and the colours. I was overwhelmed, partly by the occasion, partly by the happenstance that I had it all to myself for a short while, but mainly by the majesty of it. Since then, I've realised that print and digital reproductions fire my enthusiasm, but I need to see the works that really interest me. Turner, for instance, can be both inspiring and disappointing in 'real-life', much more so than in reproduction. Reading about Sandro Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus' is inspiring, standing in front of it in the Uffizi, even in a crowded room, is breathtaking. But this has limits. I've seen many works by Joaquin Sorolla, the Spanish 'Master of Light' and I love them, I'd really like to see the originals, but they're not gathered in once place, so how to do that (I missed the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery in London!)? I would very much like to see the Vermeer exhibition this year at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam because, once again, if you become enamoured of an artist's work, it is often difficult to get to see many examples. And here is where print and digital do come into their own. I am privileged to be able to travel and to be able to afford to see many art works. That privilege is not available to many people, so reproductions are immensely valuable. For today's artists, as someone else has said, the web provides ways of showing work to a large number of people never dreamed of before. Does this diminish the value of the original work, if it is so easy to see on line? And is the line between hand painted and digitally created work blurring? I think the future holds a lot of questions for artists. Try this, for example, https://aiseo.ai/products/ai-image-generator.html