Tuesday 21 February 2017

Piperise Your Snaps

It's not often (actually it's never) that I get an idea for an 'app', but one came to me the other day, so I pass it on for the benefit of any hot young app designer who might be reading this, unlikely as that is. Here's the pitch...
  We've all been there. You're on a church crawl, you come across a particularly striking church  in a fine setting that will surely make a good picture. You duly photograph it, look at the resulting image, are mildly disappointed, and think 'What would John Piper have made of this scene?'
  If you're at Binham Priory, say, you can easily find out. Let's say this is your photograph -


  And here is Piper's picture of the same scene, infused with dramatic presence and a brooding sense of imminent apocalypse - or at least rain ('pretty unlucky with the weather, Mr Piper,' as George VI remarked) - by the artist's bold and well loaded brush -


 But what if you've photographed a church - or it might be a historic house or some random ruin - and there is no John Piper picture of it? Well, that's where the John Piper app comes in. With a touch of a button you can Piperise your snap and transform it into a work of art, with computer-generated pen-and-ink detailing and washes of glowing (or glowering) Pipercolour. How good would that be? I'd buy it like a shot.

3 comments:

  1. I'll contribute £50,000 for 40% of the business.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nige, your post reminded me of a gallery exhibition I visited in the 1980's. The artist used a stylus to manipulate the emulsion of Polaroid SX-70 prints as they developed, with remarkably beautiful results. I googled 'polaroid art' and found several artists who still use the technique. A nice gallery can be found at www.pola-art.de.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh yes, that definitely has possibilities - at least as long as Polaroid stuff can still be had. What a fascinating medium it was, a kind of magic quality to it.Thanks Waldo.

    ReplyDelete