06.01
The great thing about an Art Blog, and of digital image technology, is that the digital copy can be the finished artwork, rather than the original, material object (a la simulacra?).
I realised that this was also the case decades ago – long before the Internet & digital – when I was drawing cartoons for various local and a few occasional national publications: that the finished work was the cartoon in the newspaper or magazine. That is, the copy was the final desired (published) artwork, not the original. I would show people the published version in my CV – the newspaper clip – rather than the original, full-size piece. The smaller published copy had all the cred. “See, I am a published artist.”
I would never show the original.
So it is, likewise with online images. Each part, or slice of a painting I do, is essentially an original piece of artwork in its own right. But rather than physically slice my canvas up, I can do it digitally, or by a process I might call “cropped omission.” I can choose to show only a portion of the work by cropping, if I wish.
And that is what I am doing here, with this “art biopsy.” I am essentially re-presenting a slice of a bigger work, as a separate art piece. And giving it a new name. A separate work from the entire painting that it is attached to, in the real world. It is not the real world here on this Art Blog. So I feel that it is legitimate if I take a section of one of my works and present that as a single artwork. I am sure this is not a new idea. Nothing is new in light of Mrs Google. I am not even going to bother searching it.
And besides, I do like the macro-results of such a simple (macro) process. It opens up a focus on other nuances and textures that our eyes don’t normally see in the flesh. Such as, some hints of the canvas weave; and a better insight into the sketchy ‘scrawl’ effect that shows itself at a macro level. I like a work to look “painterly” and “sketchy.” The macro emphasises this. The artist’s marks that adorn the canvas at the finger-scale of things are also tweaked out, rather than just the wide sweep of the arm.