David Prashker's Art Gallery: Apollinaire

Drawn by hand, way back in the mid-1970s, and I wish I could remember why, and especially why I envisaged it as Apollinaire – must have been something in one of his poems, probably. Why the vertical half-screen? Why the mirror-image? How did he get to be so thin? I have no recollection, but like the image. Scanned but never retouched, this is what it is.

When I first uploaded this to the blog, I placed it in the centre of the page, but it never felt quite right there, because there is a partitioning in the image, not quite central, but nevertheless a vertical, a perpendicular partitioning.

So I have moved it to to the left, because the face is on the left hand side of the partition, and so this allows the face to predominate. But what if it were on the right, and the empty space predominated? And smaller- does that actually change the picture in other ways as well? I have no idea if art gallery curators wrestle with this sort of problem on a daily basis, but I have a feeling that they probably do, and if they don't, they ought to. And in the age of the digital picture and the digital art gallery, this is going to become an aspect of the artist's planning too.

Below is the same painting - though it seems to me that it may also be an entirely different painting, and even of an entirely different fictional model - inverted by flipping it horizontally; this time I have put it back

in the centre of the page.

And would it be improved or diminished, in a red plastic frame, an ornate wooden frame?

Given the nature of the piece, which seems to be a man gazing at himself in a mirror (like a curator studying a blank wall to determine where to hang a painting; like a student looking at multiple versions of a painting, to determine which...), would it be best of all downloaded to a canvas made of glass?