The Photography Adventure

I used to say “I paint to share what I find beautiful.” I still do. When I started, without a camera, I had to rely, like the old masters, on memory and imagination. My older pictures, like Vision of Troy (1966, left) reflect that. But then photography changed my vision.

In high school I learned newspaper photo-journalism. But peeks into European books in the back stacks of the library made me aware that photography was more than a journalistic tool. Shooting for the college yearbook provided the chance to play at the fine-art version. During that period I was also teaching myself oil painting.
Then, two years at sea in the Coast Guard meant it was photography that trained my eye. When my painting portfolio got me into art school as a junior, I majored in painting with Vince Castagnacci but couln’t resist making photography my second area of concentration with Phil Davis. Both professors left deep and lasting marks on my outlook as an artist.

But the GI Bill wasn’t enough. Dropping out with no BFA meant going back to commercial art. My journalism and print media experience made it easy to step up through book production, advertising and typesetting. Ann Arbor had enough good illustrators, so when I became an agency art director, product photography gave me the chance to exploit and expand my skills. 
And as I embarked on adventures in fencing, travel and medieval re-creation, it was photography that got practiced, not painting. The shot at left was taken with the company’s Hasselblad. 
But in my mind, I was still a painter deferring my painting career. I took many pictures specifically to paint later. 

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Photographer with a brush

By the time I got back to painting, thirty years had gone by. I used photos as the basis for paintings, but my old pix no longer measured up. I shot new ones.
But I followed them too faithfully. From ten feet away, in spite of obvious brushwork, my paintings were constantly mistaken for photos. At the art fairs, visitors marveled and called them photo-realistic.
This was not what I had intended. But soon I realized that my paintings included all the things that make a photo different from a painting: color gamut and contrast range, constrained by a camera’s focal length, depth of field, and framing. Key word: constraint. My painting From the Island (right) is one example.
I ended up posting signs saying “These are NOT photos.”

Then a small voice said “but that does not make them real paintings.”
I slowly came to realize that a painter can see better than a traditional camera and film. The scene is too contrasty? Caravaggio reveled in it. The lens can’t capture such a wide angle without distortion? That didn’t bother Rembrandt when he painted the so-called “Night Watch.” Fewer colors are visible at night? Open fewer tubes of paint. But above all, see outside the camera’s box.
I had to realize that all those years of product-related photography and design had given me a good eye, but it was that of a photographer, not a painter.

Beyond the lens

The difference goes much deeper than these technological limitations. A photograph is captured but a painting is created. 
I got inventive. You tell me there are no pirate ships “manned” by women? My painting In Soundings (detail left) is well beyond the lens of any camera other than those in the mind.

But is ditching the camera enough? At U-M, professor Phil Davis had raised the bar. Looking at one of my photo prints, he asked, “what is there in this picture worth my time to look at?” He wasn’t speaking merely as a professor accustomed to quality all around him. He was speaking for every viewer’s time.
To be worth looking at, or buying, a painting must be worth more than the time, effort and materials. The visible effort in a painting asserts that the subject was worth it. If not, the cruel fact is that the artist wasted his time. Will he now waste the viewer’s?

Freezing the moment

Medieval and renaissance painting struggled with time and movement, but photography settled it: a moment in time is what both portray. Both can can also choose to capture and define duration, blurring the motion of water, “freeze” it,  – or do both, as in Thin Ice (right). 

The “lady pirates” painting also “freezes” a single instant, but also records the previous few moments via the trail of water drops from the sounding lead.

In the case of commissioned works, a record of time may be the primary purpose. For these and other paintings, I will continue to count on photography for reality data.