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Showing posts from July, 2013

come close, very close

At first glance, I thought this picture was of something I knew very well… I read in the article that it is a 1/4" macro of a Tom Thompson oil painting, photographed by Jon Sasaki. When this tiny fragment of the painting is blown up to become a new picture of 16 x 24 inches, it seems to look like a surface I am much more familiar with - the soft, shiny, dry, smooth, rough, cracked - etc etc - deeply nuanced surface of a glazed ceramic work. Jon Sasaki: macro photographic image of a quarter inch square of a Tom Thompson oil painting. 2013.  Close-up photography has offered a very different perspective on the oil painting surface, revealing how different media, and our different tools - brush, knife, finger - can be so different in process, or appear so alike, simply by offering a different scale of seeing, to appreciate what is there.