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Originally posted by: Warbler
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Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
Over the weekend my opinion of Mr lucas changed, and this is why - In 1999 I painted a portrait of a friend of mine playing his guitar. The painting is one of the best I have ever done, but was painted in a limited time period of 20 hours (five 4-hour sittings) and as a result of this restriction there were some bits I wasn't happy with. One of the things that really bugged me was that the perspective on one of the sitter's shoulders was wrong. This weekend, more than 6 years after the painting was originally completed, I started to put together an updated portfolio (I am an Ilustrator by trade) and I wanted to include what I considered to be one of my best pieces, but I didn't want to include the faults, so I took a high res photograph of the portrait, loaded it into photoshop and got to work rescaling the messed up perspective, painting out and touching up other area that bothered me, and after 5 hours of digital tinkering I had an image that I was really really pleased with. I must point out that I didn't use any photoshop filters or gadgets, I simply resized some areas to get the proportions right and used the paintbrush tools to touch it up a bit, but my point is this - yes, George Lucas should release the O-OT (The arguments for why he should do this have been made elsewhere and I don't need to repeat them), but I for one can fully understand being an artist who, unhappy with the work, decides to fix it with the help of technology that was not around or unavailable to him/her at the time the original art was created. My painting now lives up to my original vision and I consider it the definitive piece, the one that I will show people, the one that will be in my portfolio. I will not destroy the original, but I will no longer display it as I see it as inferior. You can resent Lucas' stubborness over releasing the O-OT (I do), but I will no longer call him mad, crazy, out of touch, LucASS, or any of that other crap. I also think that based on the various interviews / biographies, etc that I have seen, he seems like a very nice guy who's just doing his thing. Unfortunately his thing pisses off a lot of people, but from now on I will be giving him a break, and maybe some of you will too.

I'm curious. If your original paintings had become considered a masterpiece, a classic before you made your changes, would you then make these changes and refused to allow
anyone to see the original and pretend it no long exists? Would you force others to view your changed version instead of allowing people to choose for themselves?

That is a very good (and tough) question. I personally was never 100% satisfied with the piece, and I would have wanted to fix it regardless of the opinions of others (in fact, nobody ever pointed out these errors, they bugged me and me alone). But I suppose that if the painting was famous and loved, I would not withdraw the original from the public. Many artists have multiple versions of the same painting, often titled 'version 2' or similar, and it is up to the viewer to decide which they prefer, which I guess is what we all agree - Make the changes, but don't deny the original.