Articles & Texticles

Permit me a teensy weensy rant, if you will.

I’d like to share some of the difficulties I’ve met while trying to research painters on the web.
Now don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the fantastic breadth and depth of the many sites that have sprung up over the past few years, and enjoy the huge array of images available to picture hunters today.

However, the toothgrinding frustrations that spoil my online searches are caused by websites that either (1) flatly refuse to show any images at all, or (2), more frustratingly, offer a “zoomed” view where the zoom control interface obscures the painting I’m trying to look at and (3) those that show laughably small thumbnails but no big image.

Here’s one of the first type.
(Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images.)

“Sorry! This image is not available.”

I meet a lot of gallery websites like this, usually run by semi-governmental or municipal bodies, that either (a) have mis-spent or mis-calculated the budget to optimise images for the web, or (b) cannot get copyright clearance, or (c) they can’t find the original pictures. (This is more common than you might think).

Here’s a couple of examples of the second type of obstacle course website: The “zoomable” site that prevents not just image saving but also hampers a decent screengrab.

Get that blooming interface out of the way of the picture!.

These zoomable sites present the images as Flash files which annoyingly do not allow right click image saving. A screengrab is the only way of saving the image. However this has to be done in two grabs to avoid the persistent control interface, and then re-stitching the two grabs in a graphics program.

There’s an advanced version of this frustrating display, best illustrated by the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco website.

Here’s the thumbnail. Tempting, isn’t it?

Then, when you press that “Zoom this image” button….

Get that blooming interface out of the way of the picture!.

The above image shows the most screen clutter possible with this irritating technology. Not only is the bottom of the picture screened out by the zoom and pan controls, but there’s an almost completely useless navigation screen at top left to make sure extra details are obscured. You have to wonder why the museum doesn’t just display a big image in the first place, and ditch all that zoomable junk.

The third type of hobbled website is either just plain mean, or suffering from some rule dating back to the days of 28k modems that stipulates that all images must be postage stamp sized AND compressed to within a hair’s breadth of a total breakdown in legibility.

Typically, the guidelines for the webmaster will state: No image bigger than 310 pixels in X or Y”
Click on the thumbnail, and be prepared to be amazed by this:-

Haymaking John Atkinson 1863-1924

This is laughably referred to as the “Large ” version of the image.

Call that Big?.

The National Portrait Gallery in the UK seems to have a very strict image size policy, seen in action here, below. Just feast your eyes on that sumptious level of detail.

The NPG’s idea of bigness

If the compression in the tiny picture allows it, I sometimes enlarge these bite-sized images.
Often, however, the compression of the original JPEG is so severe that the pictures look more like tapestries than paintings, even on small percentage enlargements.

Grisly looking blowup

Sometimes a little persistence pays off, however, and better than expected results can arise from unpromising starting points.

I subscribe to the RSS feed for Art Knowledge News, an online guide to upcoming exhibitions all over the world. It has opened my eyes to many artists that I had not heard of before.

On this page of Art Knowledge News, I heard of a painter called Edward Dickey, who was unknown to me.

Now I’m guessing here, but I expect that when the public relations people at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne in N.E. England sent their press release about their forthcoming exhibition called ‘New Art for a New Era’, they were prepared for the new visitors to their website wanting to find out more. Er, I guessed wrong.

Follow the link and you get to a landing page with no information whatsoever about the exhibition.

Try a button marked “What’s On?” and somewhere down the resulting page there is a three line entry about the exhibition but no other link at all. No images, no curator’s statement. Nothing.

So, try the search box using the painter’s surname: “Dickey”. No results.

Try going up a level via the Tyne & Wear Museums button (top left), then fumble down the navigation bar on the left, hit a promising looking button marked “Art Online” and eventually end up at an image search engine. Phew.

When I used the search engine using the artist’s last name (O’Rorke) the apostrophe in the name threw up a disastrous PHP error.

I tried again, this time using his more commonly used name “Dickey” and was rewarded with the “Sorry! This image is not available.” prize.
Remember that I was hunting for information on an artist who was featured in prime position of the Museum’s press release.

You would think it might have been a bit easier.

Eventually I e-mailed the gallery (politely) and asked if there was any way that I could see the promised picture online.

They leapt into immediate action, and a week later I received an e-mail version of the picture ‘The building of the Tyne bridge, 1928′ that looked as if it had been blown up from a very compressed thumbnail, and was very washed out.

Here’s the picture from the web based press release on Art Knowledge News:

Tiny bridge picture

And here’s what the nice people at the museum e-mailed me:

Big version of ‘The building of the Tyne bridge’

I adjusted this bigger picture to approximate the more saturated thumbnail I’d originallyseen.
A good result, nonetheless.

That turned out to be a slightly longer rant than I intended. I feel much better now.

So it’s back to the image hunting, and for any of you that might be wondering why I search for pictures so doggedly, it’s because I do lectures for art & animation students about composition and scenic design.

I like to cast my net of reference wide.