Why paintings look great / by Mirena Rhee

Some think that art is about rendering something, representing it in some perfect way. If that were the case then once photography was out we would have photographed everything and that would have been the end of painting.

Painting is an imperfect representation built out of many and millions of little strokes that look total nonsense in a close-up. But at the same time, a painting has an almost infinite resolution as far as the eye can see because the little strokes are also very interesting just by themselves the way they weave together. That's why people look at painting sometimes really closely or with a magnifying glass because they want to see the tiny little imperfections, to see how it was done and how the hand flicked.

And then there is the artist with anger and sadness and happiness in all the imperfect feelings and the history of the artist. A painting reflects the imperfect state of the artist. If the artist were in perfect harmony they'd be on a beach somewhere. They are all kinds of cataclysms that are perfectly unseen and get transmitted from the artist into the painting.

Especially in Old Masters works, paintings were done with transparent glazes. Like layering hundreds of different paintings that together make the whole.

Old Master paintings look luminous even though they seem dark because the light shines through the layers and reflects off of the back, it hits the bottom white ground surface of the canvas and shines back through the layers.

Because painting is not an exact science and is not like painting by the numbers, every single dot on the landscape of the painting is composed of all kinds of different specks. Because no painter is precise with the colors there's always a lot of mixing going on, not a single dot is a pure color, there are all kinds of impurities and resins that blend with the color grains.

Paintings look different on a screen because they are three-dimensional objects built with multiple layers of overlapping lattices of particles.

Let's talk about particles. The paint layer of a painting consists of many millions of tiny particles suspended in some kind of resin. Most natural pigments in paint are ground dirt and minerals. Different pigments have different properties of course in the way they reflect light and color but most importantly each tiny particle shines and reflects light in a different direction so there is this iridescence. The particles are suspended in resin, like gems set in gold. As you move around the painting you perceive them glittering. Imagine millions and millions of tiny particles shimmering suspended in very many layers of resin, twice. The light is reflected from the ground layer back through the particles and into the eyes of the viewer.

Oftentimes the aging process of a painting adds additional details like cracks, patina, and dirt; these are not necessarily flaws. Even if there are flaws, most forgers do try to make canvases look old, not new so there is a preciousness to that process.