It’s all about seeing, isn’t it?

Having lived with art since I was a child, I’ve always played with the idea of doing photography with reference to the art I cherish. Since 1969, I have looked at Roy Lichtenstein’s 6-piece Cathedral Series from that year which were based on Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings in the 1890s.

This is about my latest edition, the Rouen Cathedral Suite #1-10.

Gemini GEL, one of the finest graphic printing houses in the world, printed them. They look like screens, newspaper-like and “pop” where the Cathedral image – with the colours expressing the light as it changes over a day – was hidden under (or in) tons of small round holes.

One has to see them at a 3-4 meters distance to at all see anything but dots. And they were faily big, 122 cm high.

Here is one of them.

And who would not love to have owned one of Claude Monet’s originals? Like this one?

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral 1895

So why do I find this fun, interesting and challenging?

I believe that art is as much about seeing as about what you see. Here is an entrance to a cathedral which, thanks to one of art history’s greatest, has become immortalized. I have always loved Roy Lichtenstein’s series, his truly innovative idea, his re-working of classical art and his ways of making us see – as he also does in, say, the Bull Series and Monet’s Haystacks.

In a way he applied filters and reproduced/re-created great pieces adapted to contemporary printing techniques. I stole the basic idea and asked myself: What if I do the same using Photoshop?

So I took down a photo of one of Monet’s original paintings from the Internet and began to play with it. I played with shapes, filters, light, contrast, saturation, colouration/tones, contrasts, sharpening/blurring and I changed things here and there, pixel by pixel so to say. There were many many more than the 10 I finally selected.

You may think it looks like just some haphazard re-production. It isn’t. It’s a carefully processed experimenting with literally hundreds of variables in each of the suite’s ten pieces.

Here is how they appear on the wall in my studio at the time of writing:

In the studio – The Rouen Cathedral Suite # 1-10   @ 2015

To the left you see one of the original Lichtenstein and then my A2 format prints on fine art Canson Edition Etching Rag papers. Lichtenstein cropped the original portal, my picture is a based on the full image of the portal that Monet painted.

I guess that Continue reading →