JACKING THE PINE

Tom Thomson’s famous painting is a little wan, in the flesh.

I’m disoriented. The colours are all over the place. To begin with, the painting has been made dingy by the passage of time. The reproductions in books are much livelier. So too is the Wiki image. De-aged, as it were.

There is one bright feature: streaks of sunset, mid-picture. This has been sampled for the colour of the walls in the gallery, with an intensity of orange-yellow that overpowers Thomson’s painting. But that’s not apparent in the photo above, not at all. Because the mobile phone’s camera has applied Auto White Balance, which drastically changes the wall’s hue from orange to yellow, lightens it, and brings out a hard edged shadow cast by the overhead lights, which falls from the frame to affect a strip along the top of the picture, and a large area beneath it.

Let us therefore imagine five Jack Pine colour-worlds:

When it was painted. Fresh, before the varnish fogged.
As reproduced in print. “Pleasing colour,” according to the trade.
In the gallery today. Dull with age, made more dull by contrast with hot walls.
By digital camera. “Pleasing colour,” according to the algorithm.
Online. “Pleasing colour,” digital file manually adjusted, according to taste (see below, right). An image search for Thomson’s Jack Pine delivers a variety of treatments, some quite lurid.

How very postmodern, that circumstance and different media should conspire to question the reality of colour; but ’twas ever thus.
Note: I’ve photoshopped an orange circle on the wall behind me, to give some idea of how I experienced the colour of the wall.

Left: In the gallery, detail of iPhone photograph at the start of this post; the painting itself has even less contrast and brightness than shown here. Right: Wikimedia image. ●