On Dec 9, 2008, at 3:20 PM, William Conger wrote:
Some paintings do look like photographs but only at a certain
viewing distance. Chuck Close's early black and white oversize
portraits are good examples.
I was going to mention Close's work.
The interesting thing in this comparison is that the artist's handwork
of painting can be altered or directed to resemble photography far
more easily than taking a photograph can be altered to look like a
painting or drawing. The principal difference in the two forms of
visual representation is that drawing and painting is a longer process
that involves lots of small hand work on a relatively large area, all
done by non-mechanical means.* By contrast, in photography, most of
the image-making work is done in one or two overall actions that
mainly rely on mechanical means (the camera). There is much less
latitude in photography to introduce the hallmarks of handwork.
Interestingly, image-manipulating computer software, like Photoshop,
include "filters" that allow the user to apply an ersatz or pseudo-
artistic appearance to a regular photographic image, from "mezzotint"
to "charcoal" and "pastel" to "cut paper" and "neon" and many other
effects. They are surprisingly versatile and very cunning, these
filters. But they impart the hand-made look the same way that the
thickly impastoed application of clear acrylic gel varnish gives a
giclee print (i.e., a high-quality photo-duplicate inkjet print) the
appearance of having actually been painted.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
