Week 20. "Adam And Eve" 30"x40" oil on canvas

Oh Adam! Oh Eve! Oh phooey! This painting is an ode to spring. It is an appreciation of every single time two people have felt love and/or attraction for each other. Original sin? Again I say, phooey! An Edenic state of mind is always possible. Enough about what I think this painting means. You decide for yourself. I'd rather talk about trying to show paintings in the digital age.
Recently I was following a juried art competition sponsored by a group based in Brooklyn, NY with celebrity judges and all. The theme was self-portraits and variations of self-portraits and was open to any medium (painting, sculpture, photography, etc...). To enter this contest an artist would submit a digital image of the art via the internet. Nine out of ten winners in this competition ended up being photographers. Stunning. Why such a ridiculously high percentage of photographers? One reason may have been that seven out of those nine winners were women who had submitted self-portraits of themselves without shirts on. But there is another answer I find is worth paying attention to. That is that when submitting art via internet your art is being seen exactly as it's meant to be seen if it's original form is a digital image. However, any work that exists in the real world (meaning it exists outside of a hard drive) will have to have a photo taken of it and hopefully represents the original somewhat accurately. In other words the judges were judging the photography in a state in which it was meant to be seen but were judging real world art from a photo which is only a poor replica of the original. In any art competition where digital art and real world art is being judged side by side on a computer screen the real world art is going to come up short. Lesson learned. That being said...
When you look at a photo of a painting online you are seeing a version or resemblance of the painting, not the painting itself. I know this seems obvious but the reality is that much of what makes painting as a medium so wonderful (like texture and nuances of color) get lost when an image of it is captured with a digital camera. So this week I'm going to share some detail images of Adam and Eve providing close up views of few different parts. Please click on the images below to enlarge.