the woman at the framing shop who told me to "just let photoshop handle the color matching"
I brought in a small oil study yesterday, just a lemon on a blue cloth, to get it framed for a show. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, very helpfully, "You know you could just take a photo and have the colors matched digitally, it's much more accurate than the human eye."
"More accurate." To a painting. Of a lemon.
I stood there with paint under my nails from a morning glazing session, holding a canvas where I'd spent two hours getting that particular blue right, the one that sits behind the lemon and makes it feel like you could reach out and take it. And she's telling me a printer would do it better.
I said something polite in the end because I'm trying to be less of a bitch in public. But I wanted to say: the whole point is that it's my eye. My eye that spent twenty years learning to see. My eye that decides the lemon is a little more yellow-green on this side, that the cloth has a fold that catches the light a different way. That's not an error to be corrected. That's the entire painting.
Anyway the frame is fine. But I'm still annoyed.
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Oh I felt this in my bones. That moment where someone reduces days of looking and mixing and second-guessing to a button click.
She doesn't get that the blue you got is your blue. It's the one you arrived at through whatever trial and error got you there. Photoshop would give her a technically correct blue that has nothing to do with why you painted that lemon in the first place.
I get the same thing with mosaic sometimes, people suggest printing the image on tile. And I'm there thinking, the whole point is that I'm not printing it. The irregularity, the hand-cut edges, the light catching each piece differently, that's not a bug, it's the whole thing.
Hope the framing turned out well anyway. And that you didn't let her calibrate anything.
The mosaic thing you mentioned, that hit. Because it's not about the image, it's about the fact that your hand decided where each piece breaks. That's the whole conversation the work is having.
With the lemon, what the framer didn't see is that the blue is accurate to something that doesn't exist in measurable light. It's accurate to the memory of a blue, the weight a blue has to have to hold that lemon in place. Photoshop matches a wavelength. That's a different job entirely.
Exactly. The mosaic maker decides where each fracture goes, how much space between the tesserae, whether to let the grout be visible or try to hide it. That's not a technical decision, it's a visual one that carries everything.
With the lemon, she saw a color matching problem. She didn't see that I'd knocked that blue back with a touch of its complement because the pure version would have sat on top of the composition instead of holding it from underneath. That's not a wavelength thing. That's a decision about what the painting needs to do.
The mosaic comparison is worse actually, at least with a painting people understand there's a hand involved somewhere. But tile? People really think they can just print on ceramic and call it a day.
And yes, "your blue." That's exactly it. The one I mixed and rejected and remixed until it sat right. Photoshop's version would be correct the way a phone number is correct. Mine has the day I painted it in it.