The Hawaiian Sunset shown on the top is a 16x20 inch acrylic on canvas painting I made in 2004. When I was on vacation in Hawaii in 2003, I saw this fantastic sunset one evening and took a photo of it. One year later I made a painting based on the photo. When I looked at the painting, it reminded me of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy of four stages of the “Precession of the Simulacrum” – from reality to pure simulation.
The “Real” happened on the Hawaiian island of Maui on a pleasant evening. The glowing sun was going down behind a far away mountain. The light colored the clouds in dark blue sky with a range of shades from light yellow, to bright orange, to brown and purple. The sky looked like it was on fire. The dark blue ocean got a lot of warm color from reflecting the sun and the sky. Waves were hitting the beach with a soft rhythm. Birds were singing. Wind was soft and warm. Trees waved their branches gently with the wind. On the beach people were relaxing, chatting and watching the beautiful sunset. Their faces were all colored as gold just like everything else under the sun. It was a great “Real” moment created by the nature.
I was deeply touched by the beauty of the nature and its calmness. Like many other tourists, I took out a camera and started taking photos of my surroundings. I was hoping that I could keep the “Real” sunset in some fashion. I wanted to take with me the sunset, the ocean, the sky, the beach, and everything else that was so beautiful at that moment. The photo shown on the bottom recorded a glimpse of the beautiful sunset. It did as much as a photo could do to copy nature’s colors and shapes, but nevertheless it was just a two-dimensional picture. From the photo one can’t hear the birds singing or the waves hitting the beach. One cannot feel the softness of the wind. The photo is not the original “Real” thing. It is a “Counterfeit”, one step removed from the original.
One year later when I looked at the photo – the “Counterfeit” of the “Real” Hawaiian sunset, I was touched by how beautiful the sunset looked. The photo reminded me how that “Real” sunset I experienced over a year ago. I decided to draw the sunset on a canvas. Although the painting was based on the photo, I made a few changes in the painting. The biggest change was that the palm tree in the middle of the photo was removed in order to give more space to the colorful sky. I also left out some minor distractions such as small ships from the photo. I made sky on the right part the painting brighter in order to provide contrast for the palm tree on the right to the blue sky. After some work, the acrylic on canvas painting of the Hawaiian Sunset was finished. I signed my name on the back of the painting and made it my production. The painting is a pretense of the reality. It reflects the mood and the essence of that beautiful sunset, yet it has deviated from the reality on many details. The painting is not the “Real” sunset, and it has morphed from the “Counterfeit” photo of the “Real”. The painting is the third stage of the precession – the “Production” according to Baudrillard’s theory.
After the painting was done, I was quite happy with my work and wanted to show it to my family and friends. I took a digital picture of it and compressed it as a JPEG file. Since the picture is a digital file, it is easy to distribute it to as many people as I want with little hassle. I also uploaded it to my photo sharing web site so that people can view it directly from their web browsers. The digital picture of the painting is the last step of the precession – the “Pure Simulacrum”.
Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy of four stages of “the Precession of the Simulacrum” is used here to explain how a Hawaiian sunset was transformed into a digital picture. The original sunset is the “Real”. The photo that captured the sunset is a “Counterfeit”. The acrylic on canvas painting that was based on the photo is a “Production”. And the digital picture of the painting is a “Pure Simulacrum”.
