Simon Vouet’s “Prudence Leading Peace and Abundance.”

Tucked away on a side street in Davidson’s St. Alban’s neighborhood is a specialty printing business that this week has a big assignment: reproducing a painting for the Louvre. It’s the latest high-profile job for Fine Art Impressions and owner Gary Kerr, who has gained a worldwide reputation – with a Davidson address.

Mr. Kerr’s specialties include photographing, scanning and printing paintings and photography for museums, galleries and artists. Recently, officials at the Louvre, in Paris, were looking for someone to create a full-sized replica of “Prudence Leading Peace and Abundance,” an oil painting from around 1645 by artist Simon Vouet.

Gary Kerr

As they sought a printmaker, the name of Fine Art Impressions kept coming up in conversations with museum and gallery experts and other references, Mr. Kerr said Thursday.

The Louvre chose the Davidson company, and sent a 5-inch by 7-inch color transparency of the painting to Mr. Kerr. This week, he is preparing proofs of what eventually will become an 80-inch tall print on canvas that most viewers will have trouble distinguishing from the original.

THE PROCESS

To create the high-quality print, Mr. Kerr is scanning the transparency into his computer using a Heidelberg Tango drum scanner. For digital photography aficionados: The scanner has a resolution of 11,000 dpi, or the equivalent of a 460-megapixel camera. (Pixels denote the amount of information that can be captured; the more pixels the higher quality the image. Consumer digital cameras are less than 10 megapixels, by comparison.)

Then, the image is prepared for printing by Mr. Kerr, who is an expert at digital imaging software. He says he was among the first testers of the original Photoshop picture editing software in the late 1980s.

Then the image is printed on canvas, using a specialized Epson inkjet printer outfitted with high-quality pigment inks.

“We are reproducing this painting on canvas full size, with the reproduction frame. It’ll be a digital pigment replica on canvas,” Mr. Kerr said.

It’s not clear what the Louvre plans to do with the painting. Mr. Kerr said the museum would not disclose its plans.

Some museums have begun reproducing paintings this way, sometimes to help preserve fragile older works. The replicas are hung in public view, and the originals are put in climate-controlled storage to prevent further deterioration.

BOSTON TRANSPLANT

Fine Art Impressions and Mr. Kerr are transplants to Davidson. He started the business in Boston in 2001, then moved it and his family to Davidson in 2003. He lives here with wife Candy and son Mitchel.

He describes the business as a “boutique printmaker.” He photographs and reproduces original paintings, then prints reproductions on art canvas, a process sometimes known as giclee printing. He also works with art photographers, printing their work on archival-quality art papers.

Clients are big businesses, museums, and galleries, including Ritz-Carlton Hotels, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photographers in the Charlotte area also use him, and their work has been seen at The Light Factory and Hodges-Taylor Gallery, among other places. (Disclosure: Mr. Kerr prints my digital photographs – D.B.)

He moved to North Carolina for business and personal reasons.

“The short of it is that I had a lot of clients in the Southeast, in Atlanta and Miami, so I wanted to get into the region. And many of my clients in the northeast were mostly seasonal,” he said.

“Of course my mother’s from North Carolina (Kinston), so I’ve been coming to North Carolina my whole life. When I was growing up, my friends would always say, ‘Your mother is so nice,’ ” Mr. Kerr recalls. “And my retort was, ‘Of course, she’s from North Carolina.’”

Fine Art Impressions is upstairs at 228 Caldwell Lane, near St. Alban’s Church. On the web: www.fineartgiclee.com.