The Art of the Copyist

When I lived in Madrid, I loved seeing the painters at El Prado every time I visited. It felt anachronistic given all the digital access we have to art, that someone would need to visit a museum to copy a painting by hand. But as Jas Knight points out in this YouTube video, you can't copy a painting until you've actually been able to walk right up to it and see it. Part tradition, sure, as Kottke points out this Copyist program has been around since 1872, and maybe a right of passage. But also, there's just no other way. It's necessity. Tough, then, to have to navigate the tourists who stumble upon your work, as I did, and gawk at an art feeling so alive and well in a stagnant, stuffy gallery, as if it had died and been resurrected.