You’re so fine - Giclée fine art prints.
Traditionally, we think of a print from an original artwork as somehow inferior and it usually sells for less than the original piece. But times have changed, and the printing industry has transformed the process over the last few decades.
There are various reasons why a print of an original oil painting might fetch less than an original.
The painting is a one-of-a-kind, in other words it’s scarce. If you own it, then nobody else does. The selling price is determined by a combination of how much a buyer wants it and how deep their pockets are. On the other hand, any number of prints can be made from it, and if only the printing process is considered, it is cheaper and less time-consuming to produce (regardless of how long it took the artist to create the image).
It’s assumed that more skill is required by an artist to paint the piece than for a printer to press a button and have a machine spew out a print. This is quite untrue, although it’s hard to compare because the skillsets are completely different. But this is a problem when comparing a creative process with an industrial one.
The original has been under the artist’s hand. This is a big drawcard - but it’s only a perception. If the image is what attracts us, then we should be satisfied that it came from the artist whatever medium it’s in. It’s still Jackson Pollock’s vision that is hitting our eyes.
Buyers are unaware of the advantages of new printing technology and modern art paper types, and assume that the print will not be a true likeness of the original. Until forty or fifty years ago this was definitely true. But now we have high-definition flatbed scanners and high-resolution digital cameras to capture the tiniest detail, and inks that are able to render nuances of colour like never before. And they are more lightfast and permanent than many oil paints. Also, fine art paper is manufactured to be more consistent than traditional paper or canvas, especially the cotton and rag varieties. Placed behind glass in a frame, a Giclée print will last over a century. It isn’t as susceptible to many of the ills that befall the canvas and wood that the artist will have used - warpage, moisture and thermal expansion. These eventually degrade canvas and oil paint unless they’re extremely well cared for, like in galleries and museums.
So transferring an oil painting to a quality Giclée print is more like placing the image into a more protected medium, as an archive.
Whereas many traditional print technologies, such as lithography, use the classic CMYK four-colour palette, Giclée printers use up to twelve individual colours. This gives much smoother gradient transitions and a wider colour gamut. In other words, there is more depth and richness to the final print, which helps to create stunningly vibrant artwork with amazing reproduction. When applied to quality and heavy-weight cotton paper, you have a rendition of the original that meets the formal archival standards of the professional art world. And which, given that the artist’s time went into both when creating the image, is possibly worth more than the physical material of the original painting.
