Color Plates

I've been browsing the net for good scans of art by fave painters, and it turns out there aren't many. Lots of lousy scans, though.

I once saw a Renoir live in a museum (don't remember the title, but the subject was an outdoor lunch party) and was astonished by how alive it was in person. I'd seen reproductions that looked fine but couldn't communicate the way the light bounced off the paint in such a way as to give the image a magical appearance of life. The figures seemed to breathe. I'd always liked Renoir before, but I'd never realized how magnificent he really is. Some art loses in reproduction.

Over the weekend I perused a book about commercial artists, and I realized their stuff is created to be reproduced, so it usually is created with an eye towards how certain colors and textures will look after being photographed and printed, while gallery art ought to be seen live. It's not often that one gets to see great works live, depending on where one lives... before reproductions, people had to actually go to Rome or wherever to gaze upon great works... if you were an artist you had to hoof it all over the place to get a full-flavored education about your medium. Nowadays we like to think we can thumb through a few good books of reproductions to get the same education, but Renoir showed me that that we can't put too much faith in those glossy plates...