Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

I suspect that this whole exercise is moot. However one adjusts their color spectrum, I'm still staring at tiny digital reproductions of paintings on a fairly cheap LCD monitor.

One of the things I've learned by reading a book on art, and then wandering around various art museums looking at the very art that was pictured in the book, is that paint is different from ink or pixels. You can look at a poster print of a famous painting all you want, but you still haven't seen the painting. Paint has color and texture and light-catching qualities that defy easy reproduction.

For example, I wrote an essay on Vermeer when I was in high school. Then I went to see some Vermeers. And, frankly, "View of Delft" is not very interesting in print, even if you see it reproduced in the correct size, but in person "View of Delft" is amazing. It has atmosphere. And across the room from "View of Delft" in the Mauritshuis is "Girl With A Pearl Earring", an absolutely ubiquitous work, reproduced on book covers and posters everywhere, but I can't look at those posters anymore, they are hopelessly flat and dull. The actual "Girl With A Pearl Earring" is far more beautiful.

> I'm still staring at tiny digital reproductions of paintings on a fairly cheap LCD monitor.

If you've seen the originals, there is a 3D quality that is also lost. He had a way of sculpting the paint on the canvas, which I've never seen in any reproduction.

Yes! I noticed that too when looking at a Van Gogh in person. He had built it up using a lot of paint - almost like what you see when a small child uses way too much finger-paint. The physical texture of it was striking.

Not to mention the paints have translucent and reflective qualities, all of which are lost on a 2d print or monitor.

This is moot for another reason. Your eyes take in the full spectrum of color and produce 3 scalar values for red, green, and blue. One can take a work of art, illuminate it with pure white light (containing all colors, not just red, green, and blue), determine these RGB values that your eyes will experience, and store them in an image file. You can takes this file and reproduce the work on a computer monitor, on a printer, etc. It will look the same as the work of art under white light. As soon as you illuminate the work of art with different light, all bets are off. The RGB values do not contain enough information to determine what the work of art would look like under arbitrary spectrum. For extreme examples consider the following effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence

Conclusion: illuminating a reproduction under different light, or processing a reproduction (an image file) in a computer, will not necessarily give you an accurate representation of what the original would look like. We need more information to know if what they saw in that light room is actually what the original would look like under that light. The same goes for the examples on the page.

A great example of this for me was that modern art painting that is just a specific shade of purple or violet (I forget the name, might be "shade #456" or something). It would look like total BS on paper, but displayed in the gallery it had this very strange effect, like a black hole, or weird dead zone, a matte presence that was a distinct experience.

This is precisely right. And a great deal of modernist work is just like this... for reasons that may be obvious if you think about them: In a world with ubiquitous photography, the details that don't show up in photos are even more special, and art galleries have the time and space to focus on them.

Those paintings that seem to consist of just one black line on a field of white? They make sense in person. (Hint: Just because it's notionally a field of white doesn't mean it isn't made of seventy-five overlapping layers of slightly different shades of white paint. Just because it's notionally a black line doesn't mean the line is uniform.)

Right. I'm curious where he got the images. Certainly you just have to google image search "van gogh starry night" to see the huge array of color balance "interpretations" you'll find on the net.

That said, I did think it was interesting how for instance in the sunflowers, there are a few highly-saturated parts (the centers of the flowers) that pop in the originals, but blend into maybe a more coherent image in the version with the color deficiency simulation.

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