Original Art vs Prints: What You Actually Get for the Money

A print of a painting might cost £30. The painting itself might cost £300. It is a fair question what the extra buys you, and the honest answer is more interesting than one being better than the other.

What makes something an original

An original is the object the artist actually made. There is one of it. The paint sits on the surface in ridges and pools where the brush or the knife left it, and in raking light you can read the whole history of how it was built up.

That is the part a print cannot reproduce. A print is a flat photograph of a surface that is not flat. It can be an extremely good photograph on lovely paper, and it will still be flat.

What you are paying for

Time, mostly. A painting that took three weeks cannot cost what a file sent to a printer costs. You are also paying for the fact that nobody else has it, and for the risk the artist took making something that might not have worked.

Prices in this collection run from about £45 to £700, and size is only part of what sets them. A small piece that took a long time can be worth more than a large one that came quickly.

Where prints genuinely make sense

Prints are not a lesser choice, they are a different one. They make sense when you want an image that only exists as a print, when you are filling a large wall on a small budget, or when the room is somewhere you would not want to risk an original, like a rented flat you move out of every year.

If you do buy prints, it is worth knowing the terms. An open edition is printed indefinitely. A limited edition is capped at a stated number and signed by the artist, and that scarcity is what you are paying for. Giclée describes the printing method, a high quality inkjet process, and on its own it tells you nothing about how many exist.

A word about value

You will read that original art is an investment. Be careful with that. Most art, including most art sold by galleries far larger than this one, does not rise in value, and there is no reliable resale market for work by artists who are not already established.

Buy something because you want to look at it every day for years. If it appreciates, treat that as a bonus rather than a plan.

Starting small

If you have never bought an original before, you do not have to start at the top of the price list. There are pieces here under £100, and a small original hung well does more for a room than a large print does.