I love the work of photographer David Lorenz Winston,
so when I saw what looked to be an original oil painting by him
entitled "Solitude", at an unbelievably low price, I couldn't believe
my eyes. I was right not to -- it wasn't an oil, but a giclée print of
a photograph on a textured gloss or surface-treated canvas, so it
looked, at least to my untrained eye, like an original oil. It glimmers
in the light and reflects light off the sides of the pigment as you
move, just like hand-painted oil or acrylic. Giclée (invented by rocker
Graham Nash) is like inkjet on steroids -- 12-colour hi-res inkjet
copies produced one-off from a digital master. By contrast, most prints
use lithography -- an upscale dot-matrix technology but with only four
colours used and relatively poor resolution. The combination of giclée
and gloss/surface treated canvas is a great example of innovation, and
I commend the studio, Northland Art Company, for using it. The photo
above (excuse the warp -- my lousy photography) is taken from the
giclée-on-canvas print; a plain print by Winston from his website is
below. You can get an idea by comparing them of the richness and
three-dimensionality that this ultra-high-resolution colour and
stippling effect adds.
 Winston's
work looks almost surreal, as if it were photoshopped, but the
giclée-on-canvas (close up sample at right) seems to restore its
'authenticity', by psychologically transforming it from a photo (a
mechanical reproduction), to a painting (a man-made reproduction).
When a photographer doctors his shot, unless it's very clever and
artistic we're inclined to call it fraud. But when an artist uses paint
or watercolour to portray something in a distorted, exaggerated or
surreal way, whether it's real or imagined, we call it art.
The distributor at Northland said the process can double the walk-by
sales of a print. And the process can make a poor art collector look
like an affluent collector of originals. Now I'm wondering if it would
be possible to take some of my 'flat' prints and either surface-treat
them, and/or re-print them onto textured canvas, so they look like the
original watercolours, oils or acrylics instead of just prints. Any
artists tell me if that's possible? And what are the ethical issues of
re-printing (for personal use only) or surface-treating a signed print
-- does this open up the same issues for the art world that digital
copying and file-sharing have produced for musicians and film-makers?
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11:48:25 AM 
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MADE IN CANADA
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