Copying Paintings

More than 110 artists competing during a timed “facsimile match” in Dafen, China on Thursday, May 18, 2006

 Ilya Repin, Portrait of the Art Critic Vladimir Stasov, 1883, Oil on Canvas, 74x60 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

(Left) John Singer Sargent, Head of Aesop, Copy after Velázquez,1879, Oil on Canvas, 18 1/4 by 14 5/8 in., Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  (Right) Diego Velázquez  (1599-1660),  Aesop (Detail), 1640, Oil on Canvas, 179x94 cm, The Prado, Madrid

Since signing up with Etsy, the online marketing website for artists and artisans, I have neglected this occasional blog of mine, which was initiated to serve as a personal catharsis and nothing more -- and maybe even a lot less. 

In the short time I have authored this blog, I have very much enjoyed entertaining myself by writing some irreverent rants about the current state of the art business for representational painters and retelling some stories about painters from the past.  But now that I have my very own virtual fine art gallery on Etsy and have fully accepted the digital marketplace, I might just as well write a little bit about my own painting activity to accompany my usual subject matter.  In case you are curious, here’s the link to my Etsy gallery: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt

Meanwhile, though,  I recently read a blog post regarding the copying of paintings, and it got me to thinking about this time-honored practice, which I believe I wrote about in an earlier post, but I don’t have a search function for this blog so it’s not so easy for me to check.  At any rate, artists at the beginning of their careers have always copied the paintings of great artists to try to learn something about technique or simply to honor one of their favorite painters. I copied a few paintings from prints years ago and sold a couple of them through happenstance, my sales rep.  I never copied directly from a painting in a museum though.  I try to avoid crowds of tourists looking over my shoulder when I am  painting.

You don’t really learn much about the process of painting by copying a great painter’s work.  Rembrandt will not be holding your brushes when you are facing the real thing and your canvas is blank.  But you can rejoice in confirming the greatness of a painter you admire when you closely examine one of his paintings and intuit how right everything seems to be in contrast to your own abysmal efforts.   I once copied a print of Ruben’s great allegorical painting The Meeting of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV at Lyon and it enabled me to fully appreciate the powerful design of this masterpiece.

As I believe I wrote in an earlier post, the Impressionist Renoir, whose early paintings I really admire, didn’t think much about the practice of copying paintings, even though he drew inspiration from the works of a number of Italian Renaissance and French artists hanging in The Louvre.  He had this to say about copying: “Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.”  I think he is absolutely right about that.

I knew a painter who had a sideline business copying paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art some years ago.  Charlie’s copies of the Old Masters were good enough to attract buyers, but he wasn’t very good at painting from life, as we witnessed the few times he painted with us at the Saturday open painting class for members of The Art Students League.  I’ve also known a couple of very good painters in their own right who copied paintings at the Met to make a little extra money. One of them scored the storefront window of a major portrait broker in New York City with his excellent copy of a Sargent portrait.

But most copyists can’t possibly gain any significant practical benefit from their labor, no matter how diligently they experiment with the presumed colors used by the great artist, because they just peck away for days to get a superficially exact copy of a painting that may have been completed in two or three hours with a simple palette and a skilled brush handling technique that is beyond the copyist’s ability to imitate.  Better to follow the example of Sargent, who dashed off some very impressive copies of Velazquez in his own bravura style to study the underlying structure he observed in his idol’s work.

On the other hand, the general public unfortunately has a huge appetite for soulless copies of paintings of famous artists.  Art factories have been around for quite some time in the United States and other countries as adjuncts to the home-decorating industry.  But the most egregious manifestation of the business of copying paintings can be found in the fertile, nearly tropical climate of South China’s Guangdong Province.  Within the past 20 years, Chinese entrepreneurs in that province have taken this business of copying paintings to incredibly outrageous levels of marketing, thus furthering the cultural debasement of this once-great civilization, which in past centuries contributed so much beauty to the world of high aesthetics. 

According to various Internet sources, as many as 5,000 artists work at copying paintings for the global art market every day in one art “sweatshop” in Dafen, one of 10 artist-villages in Guangdong Province.  This enterprise reportedly produced 50,000 paintings in a month and a half for Walmart.  It is said that artists in these art factories have produced 60 percent of the world’s paintings by slavishly copying just about every painting that was ever painted by a well-known artist in days gone by.  The village exports about five million paintings every year!  The fastest workers can copy 30 paintings a day!  I would be mortified to learn that these speed merchants are able to accurately copy detailed photographic images of Rembrandts and Vermeers at that rate!  But if they are copying Picasso, Matisse or Jackson Pollock, then I suppose it’s quite possible to achieve such numbers.  On second thought, exactly copying one of Pollock's random "drip paintings" might be impossible.  One reason some painters are proud of their  bold, somewhat sloppy and accidental alla prima approach to realism is that it is harder to make an exact copy of their work.

The image at the top of this post is a photograph showing more than 110 artists competing during a  timed “facsimile match” in Dafen on Thursday, May 18, 2006.  They are copying a photograph of Ilya Repin’s 1883 portrait of the art critic Vladimir Stasov.   Many of these copyists are artists who have been well-trained in the rigid art academies of China, which are modeled on the art academies established in Russia by the great Repin and his fellow Realist painters in the late 19th Century.   In my humble opinion, these copyists are disgracing the memory of this great artist by mechanically copying, as fast as they can and for eventual export to the global market, no doubt, a photograph of this painting, which Repin created when he was in full stride at the age of 39 after years of honing his craft with all his heart and soul.  Repin would not be amused. 

By the way, there are so many online images of this Repin portrait -- and they all look exactly alike -- that I have no idea whether they are all the same official photograph of the original painting in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg or whether some are exact photographic copies on canvas of the official photograph of the original painting and were produced at one of those Chinese painting factories.  When I last visited Google, there were 139 images of Repin’s portrait of Stasov on 139 individual websites.  I’m not about to click on every one to see if I can spot any “facsimiles.”  I think the one I've chosen to reproduce is the one I found on one of the Wiki websites, which claims its image of the Repin portrait “is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.”  With my post, Google now has at least 140 images of this painting.

If you have access to a good printer, couldn’t you just download one of those images and print it on high-quality, canvas-textured paper yourself?  Digital printing can reproduce the smallest details of a high-resolution digital photograph of a painting far more accurately than any painter can.  Still, it’s probably cheaper to buy a Chinese knock-off.  A nice frame for your print would probably cost more than the whole package from China.

And finally, at least as far as I am presently concerned, maybe I shouldn’t get so upset about this business of copying paintings for the global art market.  Painters have always cited music and art as the two essential ingredients for a happy life.  The works of Mozart and other great composers are readily available on recordings and live performances for all the world to enjoy.  Maybe there really is nothing wrong with copying the works of great painters so they can be enjoyed by everyone in the privacy of their own homes, not just by those who are friends of the rich guys who own the Rembrandts.

I’m not convinced, however.  Serious music is performed seriously with loving care by serious musicians who rehearse long and hard before the performance so they can properly display and venerate the genius of Mozart.  Despite all the “attention to detail” claims on the websites of these art sweatshops, somehow I don’t think a half-hour copy of a Rembrandt painting from a photograph that is destined for Walmart and made by kids right out of art school in assembly line fashion is in the same league.  I could be wrong.  Maybe that’s all the high art we can stomach. Look at all those daily painters in America slavishly copying photographs to create 6x6 in. paintings of teacups, strawberries and puppy dogs for the global market!  Now that Walmart copy of an Old Master painting  produced in a Chinese art sweatshop from a digital photograph doesn’t seem so shameful, does it?

A Pin-up for the 4th

Gil Elvgren, Looking for Trouble, 1953

I notice that a few bloggers have marked our nation’s Independence Day in some fashion, so I thought I would do the same.  Since I’m no longer interested in the patriotic folderol surrounding the event, I’ll just sit home by the computer this evening and waste a little more time creating my own trifle regarding this national holiday.

I remember once watching the annual fireworks display from a very high floor in one of the old World Trade Center buildings at a little viewing party thrown in the office of an acquaintance about 25 years ago.  I found the view of the fireworks display looking down on it to be far less thrilling than looking up at it.  But the crowds actually attending this event at ground level are unbearable, so I no longer bother leaving my apartment to venture riverward – east or west, depending on the promoter’s whim.  None of my fireworks forays in my youth resulted in particularly pleasant memories, anyway – some memorably unpleasant, as a matter of fact. The holidays, including this one, however, are excellent days to stay home and paint on a still life.  I believe there is something inherently noble about engaging in an activity that is so far removed from the media spell cast on the entire country.  It’s like being a martyr for the cause of painting.  And sometimes I paint a little better on such occasions.

At any rate, I found the perfect image for this national celebration in a 1953 illustration by Gil Elvgren, the best pin-up artist by far of all those great illustrators from the 1930s to 1960s who plied the joyous trade of depicting feminine pulchritude at its peak.  I saw a show of his pin-ups in a Soho gallery some years ago and was smiling about it for days afterward.  He used photo references, of course, but he started out with pretty Minnesota girls under the age of 21, and could draw so well that you don’t look at his illustrations and immediately say “photograph.”  You just smile and admit that those luscious figures he painted are simply fabulous.

By contrast, that same show included a portrait Elvgren did from life -- his wife, as I recall.  And it cheered me a little bit to realize that it wasn’t very good.  Same thing with Norman Rockwell and a lot of other great illustrators.  They all wanted to paint like Sargent or Zorn, et al, in their illustrations, as Andrew Loomis wrote about in his comprehensive book, Creative Illustration, but they couldn’t come close when faced with the real thing in front of them. Yes, there is a great divide between illustration and real painting.  But don’t tell anybody, because you will just get cussed out.

Anyway, enjoy the 4th of July if you must.  The sun comes up tomorrow.

Becoming an Artist, Virtually

Ginger, the Cat, doesn't pay much attention to my paintings

Well, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I just signed on with Etsy to become a virtual artist with a virtual gallery and a virtually unlimited worldwide viewing audience for my paintings.  The idea of Etsy is very intriguing.  Trying to get into a real gallery in New York City, or anyplace else, for that matter, is almost impossible, given the incredible number of “emerging” artists prowling around these days with their digital portfolios full of images of pretty darn good paintings.  The art world is full of what Noel Coward said about the stage, “implacable ambition.”

And I know that at my advanced age I will never acquire an idyllic storefront gallery in some quaint tourist town where I can sit all day and wait for the occasional unsuspecting tourist to drop in to admire my paintings and walk out without buying a single one of them.  I think I would really love that kind of life.  I had paintings for a long time in a Soho gallery that was operated along those lines.  If people bought the paintings the owner liked well enough to display, that was fine.  If they didn’t buy them, that was fine also.

Etsy makes it very easy for any artist to set up a virtual storefront gallery with the potential for unlimited virtual tourists to drop in unannounced.  Maybe they won’t buy anything either, and I have some concern that not all visitors to the online marketing sites are square shooters.  But at least my paintings will most likely be seen by someone other than me and Ginger, the cat, who doesn’t pay much attention to them, unless she can scratch her chin against the edge of the canvas.  And who knows, maybe I actually will do a little shipping and handling in the real world because of Etsy.  That would be very nice.  I need to make room for all the new paintings I plan to keep making, the Good Lord willing and the Creek don’t rise, as they used to say when the world was a kinder, gentler place, at least if you didn’t think too hard about anything, the fish were biting and you always rooted for the home team.  

I really don’t have much to say at this time about my new adventure.  I’ve always hated to talk about my paintings with all the people who know me, in the non-biblical sense of knowing, of course.  But in the vast world of the Internet, somehow it doesn’t seem such a hard thing to do – talk about my paintings, that is.  I’ve often longed to tell people about how I acquired a particular object to put in a still life, and all the struggles I went through to get a reasonable facsimile of the things I was painting.  I can see myself blathering on interminably about the most mundane of my paintings.  Dealing with strangers is always more satisfying than dealing with people you know.  When I worked at the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my young colleagues would time me out at around 20 minutes as I talked about the museum’s glories with polite visitors whose main interest was finding the nearest bathroom ASAP. 

I’m mildly excited about this new venue for showing my paintings, and invite anybody who might have read down this far to take a look at my Etsy site.  Here’s the link:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt.   I’ll try to write something less self-serving in my next post – maybe something about “hearing voices” when I paint.  Nothing strange about that for an artist.