Why Original Art Never Looks the Same in Person as It Does Online

I spend days on a colour. Mixing it, putting it down, scraping it back, mixing it again, because the wrong blue makes the whole painting a failure. Okay so maybe I am being dramatic but it does feel that way some days.

Then it goes online, where somebody will see it at twelve percent screen brightness, lying in bed, in a rectangle the size of a playing card. Not really giving it a change for a great first impression but there we are living our best lives in a digital world.

This is fine. This is genuinely how most people meet art now, including most of the people who go on to live with it for twenty years. I have sold a lot of art this way, I am not bragging but letting you know people will buy art from a screen. I often send extra video and close ups also to the potential buyer if they want a closer look. But it is worth knowing exactly what the screen takes away, because if you know that, you can buy well from a photograph.

Scale is the first thing to go

Every painting is the same size on a phone. A piece six feet across and a piece the size of a book arrive identically, and your eye has no way to tell the difference. This is the single most common reason a painting disappoints when it lands, and it is almost never about the painting. It is that the room needed something with more presence than the buyer pictured.

The fix is boring and it works. Put painter's tape on the wall at the actual dimensions and live with the rectangle for two days. You will be surprised how often you go bigger. I always tell people to do this first, and leave it on the wall a little while so you can live with that size and decide before you make a purchase.

Surface is the second

A photograph flattens. It has to, because it is a flat thing. What it cannot record is that a passage of a painting is really smooth or extra rough, or that a section has been built up and sanded back six times, or that there is grit in the paint that catches light differently as you cross the room. My resin pieces to well here because they come alive in video but not all paintings can make light dance the way those do.

This is the part people describe as the painting looking alive in person. It is not mystical. It is that the surface changes as the light and your position change, so the work is never quite the same twice. A print cannot do this. A screen cannot show it.

So when you are looking at work online, ask for the detail shots and the raking light shots. Any artist who works in surface will have them and will be pleased you asked. I know how it feels when someone shows interest in your hard work, so just ask.

Light is the third

The photograph was taken under one lighting condition. Your room has several, and they change all day.

This is why I photograph work in more than one room and more than one light. Not because the rooms are yours, they are visualisations, but because seeing the same piece warm and cool tells you far more than a perfect studio shot does. A painting that holds up in three different lights will hold up in yours. Different lightbulbs, wall colors and the amount of natural light in a room all change the way you will percieve the colors in artwork.

What actually survives the screen

Composition survives. Color relationship mostly survives. Whether the piece makes you feel something in two seconds survives, and that is not nothing, because it is the same two seconds it will get every morning when you walk past it.

Original artwork is a personal piece of someones time and energy and devotion to a craft that may have taken them a lifetime to perfect. It is never going to feel the same owning a print.

If you are considering a piece and you want to understand what it actually does

to a room, ask for the detail images and the scale reference. I would rather answer ten questions than have something arrive and be smaller than you imagined. I also may be able to place the artwork in a mock up image for you if you would like to provide some photos of your space.

Thanks for stopping bye.

Sincerely,

Dani