Guild Articles and Editorials

    Paul Andrus

Part 4: Making Multiple Series of Works

Artists have always worked on making more than one painting of the same image, but, only slightly different from each other.  Van Gogh did at least nine paintings of his “Room in Arles”, and Monet did multiples of his “Haystacks” and of the “Cathedral at Rouen”.  This meant that they had to recreate that image each time to their canvas before starting.  This was very time consuming.  At one time artist had their apprentices to do this for them, Rubens talks about how his factory worked making copies of works and how much he charged for how much work he actually did on the painting.  He was a shrewd painter.

Now with Giclées you can create a piece up to a point that you feel is sufficient as a base print.  Then by having it photographed at that stage you can then have extras printed up and then continue to work on each as original works by themselves.  Think of the time that you could save in re-making that base image each time.

Or, you could do as Rubens did with his apprentices.  By making prints of your fully finished works and then adding to them and sell them as “Artist Enhanced Prints” making them one of a kind prints and not part of a numbered run,  or as “Special Editions” of a very limited run of 5 or 10.

Another method that you could think on is, finding parts of a painting that in itself is a wonderful image or an abstraction of the greater image and creating a new piece from the original.  To do this all you need is a good eye and someone with a good camera, or to have it done for you digitally on the computer.  This gives you the ability to actually make more than one image from a single work of art.  Again, you could choose to continue to enhance that piece after it is printed making it a one of a kind original work.  Artists have done this all through time.  How many pieces did Picasso create from that he would have thrown away, but found one part of it that stood out to his eye.  He cut away that part and had prints  made of it, and sold the cut out image as a finished piece.

You have to remember that this is your work, you didn’t steal it.  How can you steal from yourself?  You have the right to use any part or parts of your works that you wish to for what ever purpose that you desire.  Photographers do this all the time.  The only reason why painters and drawers haven’t done much of this in the past is because the technology to do it wasn’t available.

Well, now it is available through the digital marvels in photography and printing.  Giclées are making their way into the art market very rapidly.  In most cases the quality is equal to the original.  Depending on the type of inks used, the media printed on and the quality of both the digital photo and the machine used to print with it is almost impossible to tell the original from the print. 

Paul Andrus