Casting A Wide Net For Art

The Irish Times, Saturday, June 28, 2003

The Internet has proved a boon to art dealers, auctioneers - and to artists. With digital imaging and luminous colouring, some paintings look better on the screen than in reality.

Modern portraits or abstracts, with their acrylic hues, carry an on-screen glow. While Old Masters, whose integral white light has subdued through the centuries, or is sometimes rven by glare or varnish as they hand in galleries, can have a richness and depth of field restored online.

Mostly, though, art on the web is about access to an audience. In the case of both painters and dealers, this means being seen in Vladivostok as well as in Tullamore and being bought by enthusiasts, anywhere. Often, editions of prints are cheaper to buy via the web than in shops, because they are being sold direct.

Since the equestrian artist, Peter Curling, set up his website in Tipperary, he has sold limited editions of his prints worldwide. Now in his late forties, Curling's and his early years were spent in the West of Ireland.

Intrigued from infancy with the anatomy of the horse and rhythms of walk, trot and canter, he showed precocious talent at 14 by having an exhibition of his drawings at Lambourne, England, where his family was then living.

As an adult he developed a reputation for horse studies, but gave up a steady line in commissions, in order to broaden his vista, notably with oils of Florence and Venice and Tipperary.

In many of these pictures, water is dominant. Light shimmers across the dappled surface of Lake San Giorgio (Late Afternoon) or sits still on the floodwater of the Suir Valley in Tipperary in Winter.

These textures transmit easily to the web. Limited editions of prints are for sale on his website and are bought overseas. "It about pays for itself," he says.

Since Whytes of Dublin, the art auctioneers, went online with their website about three years ago, they have seena steady increase in traffic. "I spent a few hours a day now processing enquiries on the web," says Sarah McCloskey.

"It cuts down on people lumbering larger paintings into us for valuation. Sellers, of all ages, seem able to get a digital picture into us by email. Because we have a link to our archive of prices from previous auctions, sellers see what their own pictures could make on current market prices."

Increasingly, Whyte's auctions have telephone bidders abroad or in the regions viewing their digital catalogue as the sale is being conducted.

"The web is a positive selling aid," says McCloskey. "The online viewer can also see euro converted to dollars and sterling, as the sale is progressing. We also supply links to an artist's previous work or to galleries. It is a resource as well as a sales aid."

Selling online has been taken a step further by a business parternship in the West. With a catalogue, oilpaintingsale.com, they supply original works by Irish, Czech and Russian Painters, delivered to anywhere in the world with a reliable postal system.

Based in the Irish countryside, they also supply original paintings of period pub exteriors, Guinness art, and hold an online library of Irish landscapes and cities.

Their paint-to-order range delivers uncanny look-alikes of customer's favourites, from Renoir to Van Gough to Picasso - and back. A Limerick restaurant hung Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Arles and found it became a talking point, as to whether it was real or not.

"We make it clear it is a copy painted by a professional artist - flexing his talent, as it were..." says Stellajane Birdthistle, who comes from a well-known Munster family of fairground operators and trained as a graphic artist before having two children, now aged 11 and four.

She operated the website from her house in Clonlara, Co Clare in conjunction with her business partner Keith Judd, based further along the coast in Castlebar.

Although most of their trade is conducted online, she often travels to buyers to show them the actual painting before purchase. "We have not gone totally hi-tech yet - you still cannot beat the human eye and feel of the real thing....."