Tim Boucher

I guess the official title of the original Matisse I copied this from by hand* is, according to Wikipedia, The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room).

I put an asterisk after “by hand” above, because I used a projector to trace the drawing from. Some weird purists might argue something or other, but I still traced it “by hand” and then painted it by hand. So I think there’s no shame in tracing something. Make art however which way you gotta do it, just do it.

I wrote a while back, and a couple paintings ago, about how some theories exist trying to prove some Old Masters at a certain time started using projectors, lenses, optical technologies in order to get suddenly much more realistically rendered human figures. It’s a theory that seems to hold a lot of apparently truthful elements, whether or not it can be conclusively proven as having been historically the case. It should have been so, if it was not so.

Likewise, working with AI image generators especially has renewed my interest in this process and physical technology of how do you create and transmit, copy and modify images. Especially where the computer is not the end-all-be-all point of production and consumption, but where digital technologies can meaningfully and most fruitfully intersect with physical ones, in whatever form they take.

I didn’t do this Matisse copy as a forgery, but doing reproductions is a time-honored way of becoming a better artist. It causes you to look extremely closely, line by line, section by section, color by color, even brush stroke by brush stroke. I haven’t done a ‘master copy’ since I had to for my first year of art school, when I did a pencil rendering of Duchamp’s cubist piece, Nude Descending A Staircase. (No. 2, apparently).

I think my final result is “pretty good” but much of what I see when I look at it are the areas I sort of lied or flubbed what was going on in the original painting. For example, I added some black border drawings where Matisse appears to have used other colors. I didn’t have a great large image of the original, and also relied over-much on the colors as projected by the projector to sort of set the tops and bottoms for white and grey. But after a while I realized my end result was much darker, for example, in the dark blue shapes on wall and table.

I could go on and on about all that, but I won’t cause the end result is “fine” and the process was “very good” and “quite informative” as I had hoped. I guess I was ultimately inspired by this series I’d recently watched on YouTube with convicted forger John Myatt, called Forger’s Masterclass. This should be a playlist of the 10 episodes in this British series. I enjoyed all ten, some more than others.

But watching it gave me a lot of great perspective on how to look at styles from other painters, and how to try to recreate them technically, but also imbuing them with the creative spirit of the original or model.

I haven’t even gotten to fully sort out how I think this all relates to questions around art + creativity + AI + evolution of technology + copyright etc stuff… but looking at a number of videos on semi-famous (known) art forgers was a pretty interesting diversion a few nights ago, so I’ll drop them here below for interested parties.

Hebborn is interesting among these because his drawings tend to adhere much more closely to the originals and their styles than some of the others do. As I like to think of it, a con artist is still an artist though…

I’m really interested in this line of real vs. fake around forgeries particularly. And how a reproduction becomes a forgery only when it is placed in a certain light – where it is represented as the original work, instead of authentically as a reproduction. And then largely how much of the forging becomes of documentation, chains of custody, false witness in order to create a saleable quantity. And then how as those items get passed through hands of many collectors, this may give them undeserved status as being genuine originals.

It’s all quite convoluted and messy, and it’s mentioned in the Beltracchi video that he may be under some kind of non-disclosure agreement regarding owners or dealers, etc. It’s also interesting to me how some of these painters were able to pass off their work as authentic, when a lot of times the fakes don’t really look all that much like the art of the original artists… it’s weird.

One of the narrative conceits I see in a number of the videos I watched on this subject is that the artists who did these reproductions which were sold as forgeries were or are somehow themselves “not real artists.” They might have been forgers and copyists, but to my mind, they are absolutely “real artists” (even the ones whose works don’t look quite right relative to the models), because what art is is looking closely and working hard to master something. Even imperfect copies have a great deal of value, whether or not we try to pass them off as real fakes or fake fakes.

Anyway, running out of time & steam. That’s all for now.