If I were looking at any painting at least once a week for my entire life, watching it deteriorate, finding little mistakes the painter made… I would get some ideas.
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Thank god you don’t work at a museum.
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I imagine she is also really into Christmas.
Your mention of Precious Moments reminds me of a college friend who went on to work as a stained glass artist at the Precious Moments wedding chapel in Carthage (Missouri). Maybe they could get him on the horn and paint up some Catholic artifacts!
If the Mona Lisa was owned by a group of people for whom it had religious significance and they wanted to change it, then why the heck not? “It’s their thing.”
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Why do you think they “own” this? They dont. Is not theirs. Is an heritage for the whole nation, not their private stuff.
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Yeah, setting contemporary aesthetic preferences aside, there’s no telling whether or not this woman’s works is truer to the original coloration of the sculptures (unless there’s been some forensic or other examination of that sculpture or similar ones to determine how they were typically painted).
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I’m certain the Catholic Church would disagree.
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I don’t like the way the painted statue looks, myself, and I believe I understand that “ugh!” reaction of shock to the cartoon-ish result.
But the original statue was decidedly not the Mona Lisa. The BBC story describes the location as a chapel in a village with just 28 residents. The statues were not previously recognized as precious. They’re not behind bulletproof glass in a museum.
Imagine a chapel set up by lonely outcasts in Salton Sea, CA. It’s decorated with 20th-century velvet Jesus paintings, ceramic maneki-nekos, and plaster statues of Mary. Allow it to age. In the year 2600, would all that junk somehow be considered “important artifacts,” just by virtue of its age?
Now, maybe these wooden figures do have some special historical or artistic merit, but the articles here are not making that case, they’re just yelling “old thing ruined by paint job!”
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The Catholic Church here also got their right wing conservatives help into making stuff like the Cathedral-Mosque in Córdoba “theirs”.
Doesnt mean they are right.
So were the buildings. Show an ancient Greek or Roman around Washington DC and they’d wonder what the deal is with all those plain white stone pillars.
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At the wonderful Vasa Museum in Stockholm, instead of painting the beautiful wooden ship
in the original garish, hideous, amusement-park-ride colors,
they use projectors to show what the colors were like. Obviously an expensive solution for your typical church.
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Those (usually Byzantine) depictions of newborn Jesus as a functional (just small) adult, an Alia Atreides, a Village of the Damned child, always creep me the hell out.
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i knew that i should have kept my argyle vest.
those things are timeless.
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It looks like the artist managed to stay within the “lines”, although the Northern European coloration could be considered the one botch-up (if one were a believer at all).
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The ultimate l’enfant terrible!
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In churches, projection is everything.
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It’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples of horrible religious art being displayed in churches.
I toured a gigantic church down in Peru that featured local artist reproductions and original works. A surprisingly large number of them looked like the first post on a teenager’s Deviantart page. Terrible perspective, distorted bodies (especially faces), flat coloring, every mistake that beginners make. And they were hung for centuries in these massive connected stone cathedrals. I wondered at the time how many superior works never got shown because the space was already taken by this first year student picture and the church never considered rotating the paintings.
I also wonder how many of these works are incompetent in other ways, like using paints that won’t stand the test of time or not preparing the surface properly so they start peeling after a couple of years.
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Artists’ apprentices began by learning to prepare canvases and mix paints for their masters before they learned how paint pictures, so those terrible paintings are probably as durable and well-preserved as works by great masters.
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The ones in the cathedrals yes, obviously because they have already survived for hundreds of years. The ones in the original post? I’m not so sure those aren’t something like CraftSmart Acrylics.
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