Painting from Photographs, II

"Spirea" 5x7 pastel sketch

from life

In my last blog post, I noted that we've been painting from snapshots for over a hundred years . Of course, many artists have painted and continue to paint from life. But it's appalling how many students paint from photos and nothing else. They're missing the joy of working from life, where all questions are answered truthfully. Photos can answer questions about details, but they prevaricate when it comes to questions about color and value.

What did students do before the photo? In addition to painting from life (and from plaster casts), they copied the works of the Masters. The Masters had asked the questions and received the answers, and their painting are thus largely complete. Paintings by the Masters offered compositions carefully worked out with value and color manipulated to present an idea to its fullest. Copying the Masters taught you composition, color use and concept. Working solely from photos will not teach you any of this. What it will teach you is how to copy a photograph - not to create art.

Painting from Photographs: A Philosophical Moment

"Snowy Valley" 5x7 pastel sketch

made from a snapshot

Trina, Saba and I are finally home and back on Campobello Island. The grass is knee-high and in desperate need of mowing! Surprisingly, the apple trees have already started to bloom - a good three weeks early.

Although we had two days of less-than-ideal weather in the Vermont pastel workshop, we managed to do some good work from photos. As most of you know, I don't paint from photos much. Watching the students turn decent snapshots into good paintings made me wonder: What did we do, before the snapshot was invented? And how have our painting practices changed since then?

Degas was probably one of the first to use photography in his work. His photos, of course, were hardly snapshots, since they were made on glass plates with long exposure times. Vermeer may have used a camera obscura, an ancestor of the camera. But again, there's no "snap" about using one of these! Snapshots didn't really come around until after the Kodak Brownie was invented in 1900.

Painters like Degas composed their photos carefully. A snapshot, of course, should be composed carefully, but Kodak's motto of "You push the button, we do the rest" along with inexpensive film allowed us casual shutterbugs to get a little sloppy. Digital film has exacerbated the problem. You can shoot a few hundred frames in a few minutes and pick the best composition. Careful planning has been supplanted by triage.

Before photography, painters spent a lot of time composing and designing their images. If a tree in the scene ruined the composition, it was eliminated; if a hill needed raising to improve the design, it was lifted; if a cloud pattern seemed meaningless, the artist imposed order upon it. Knowing what worked and what didn't was an important skill the painter practiced every time he went to work. But today with snapshots, many students assume that the photo doesn't just depict but also dictates, and it must be recorded without error. "Well, it was there in the photo" - how many times have I heard that?

Never assume that the photo tells your story in the best possible way. It can't - it tells the camera's story, not yours.

Indiana Workshop - Part 2

"Jan's Meadow" 8x10, oil

I'm in a hotel in Rochester, NY, after a 10-hour drive from Valparaiso, IN. With a good Internet connection, I'm able to post some more images from the Art Barn workshop. We had an excellent three days painting right around the 69 acres. Chickens and burros provided constant entertainment as we worked out our compositions and painted. I've already been asked back for next year, and it looks like the workshop wi'll be in early May again.

Tomorrow, we're off for Vermont and expect to get to Montpelier well before nightfall. I'm looking forward to two days of painting in my old stomping grounds!

The painting above is an 8x10 I did on a new version of the Multimedia Artboard. This one has a linen surface. Below are a couple of candid shots from the workshop.

Valparaiso, Indiana, Workshop

"Dogwood Time" 8x10, oil

Indiana is proving a lovely place. The grounds of the Art Barn are filled with wildflowers this week. For my oil demonstration yesterday, I painted the dogwood in front of the barn. Using Multimedia Artboard, which is a very absorbent surface, I blocked in the painting rapidly with simple colors, making sure to reserve my lightest lights for the dogwood blossoms. We had a few clouds roll in, which "killed" the lights for a bit, but I waited until the sun returned to capture the dogwood in all its glory. This 8x10 demonstration took about 45 minutes. I do like the Artboard, because the beginning layers of paint set up quickly, allowing following strokes to break in a pleasing way.

Springfield, Illinois, Workshop

"Lincoln Home" 9x12, pastel

We just finished up a three-day plein air pastel workshop in Springfield, Illinois. The workshop was full, as are all of my spring workshops this year. Although we had gusty winds the first day at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, we had good weather over all. The Lincoln Home is four city blocks that has been returned to "the way it was" back in Lincoln's day. The sidewalks are wood planks, not concrete! The second day we painted at the Lincoln Memorial Gardens, where some of the spring flowers by the lake are still blooming. Our last day was spent at the Lincoln New Salem Center. Lincoln spent his early days in New Salem before he became a lawyer. It's a rustic village of log cabins and an interpretive site with costumed docents. We had such a great time with this workshop that we're looking forward to the next one.

Above is a sketch I made of the Lincoln Home. Word has it that the little tree in front of the house is dug up and replaced with a new one every few years. There's a famous photo of Lincoln standing in front of this house with a tree that size. I suppose it's done to enhance the feeling that things haven't changed.

Now we are in Valparaiso, Indiana, getting ready to teach a three-day workshop for the Art Barn. Here we have 69 acres with chickens, burros and ducks and lots of farm buildings. There's even a dogwood blooming by the red barn, which will make a nice picture. At the end of the week, we're off to Vermont to teach a two-day weekend workshop for the Vermont Pastel Society.