Flat Paintings and Intimate Screens

This article is a development, from a presentation given at the ‘Painting in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ symposium at Art Sonje Centre, Seoul in May 2023. The paper reflects on the implications, and ethics of encountering paintings digitally as reproductions on screens and on mobile devices. It explores the idea of the digital reproduction of a painting being a translation of an artwork, and considers the idea of the close-up as used by the British filmmaker Simon Eaves, in his film 'Portrait of a Painting' (2022), which depicts one of my paintings.