Travis Louie's response to Patrick Lawrence:
[...] Prints look like crap compared to what is on the screen. Prints don't have their own backlit lightsource!
My studio was visited by reps from a photographic company, who demonstrated a device that was basically a large lightbox in a frame that had a large transparency as the art sample. The art came from a digital file. I've never seen anything come close to this as far as prints go. Perhaps in the future we will see digital work shown this way, but instead of a lightbox type situation, ... it would be with its own monitor, calibrated to the artist's specs.
As far as mimicking painting techniques with computers, I never liked that, ... If I wanted something to look like a painting, I'd just f**king paint it myself! That's all bullshit if you ask me. Computer work should be allowed to look like computerwork, ... I like the look it already has. I like the seamlessness of the color changes, the way texture maps can be altered at will! That's the point! I think it shouldn't try to be something else! It should be what it is and shown in best way possible, which it is not. There shouldn't be a constant jump from media to media, from computer to hardcopy, ... I believe the work should be displayed exactly as the artist created it on the monitor.
[...] Prints look like crap compared to what is on the screen. Prints don't have their own backlit lightsource!
My studio was visited by reps from a photographic company, who demonstrated a device that was basically a large lightbox in a frame that had a large transparency as the art sample. The art came from a digital file. I've never seen anything come close to this as far as prints go. Perhaps in the future we will see digital work shown this way, but instead of a lightbox type situation, ... it would be with its own monitor, calibrated to the artist's specs.
As far as mimicking painting techniques with computers, I never liked that, ... If I wanted something to look like a painting, I'd just f**king paint it myself! That's all bullshit if you ask me. Computer work should be allowed to look like computerwork, ... I like the look it already has. I like the seamlessness of the color changes, the way texture maps can be altered at will! That's the point! I think it shouldn't try to be something else! It should be what it is and shown in best way possible, which it is not. There shouldn't be a constant jump from media to media, from computer to hardcopy, ... I believe the work should be displayed exactly as the artist created it on the monitor.
Travis,
I think you've eloquently hit the salient points! Hard copy print will never look as good as a screen image, nor as good as an oil painting, for that matter. The basic problem lies in the limitations of printing in 4 or 8 or even 12 colours (as you know, anything over 4 inks is, so far as the technology has taken it to date, just adding different values of the initial 4 inks).
And, yes, why mimic the thing instead of doing the thing? I cannot quite get that, either. The two -- digital and physical painting -- are not equivalent, so why not just go in one direction or the other (rhetorical).
As someone else said, they are both about imagery, yes, but as I have stated, too, they are different enough so as not to be easily comparable.
Juan
