Philosophy - the Photo Trap

The Photo Trap

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 my eyes, memory and imagination. My older pictures (Vision of Troy, 1966, left) reflect that.

In my teens I got deeply into photography and pursued it both as part of my commercial art career and as a fine art. Still thinking of myself as a painter, I took many pictures specifically to paint later. Although I took both painting and photography seriously in art school, neither professor warned me about the “Photo Trap.”

When I got back to painting in 2012, I started using photos as the source of complete paintings as I had planned all along. The trouble is, I did them too well. From ten feet away, they were constantly mistaken for photos. At first I couldn’t figure out why.
But soon I realized that I had unknowingly captured the special qualities that make a photo different from a painting or drawing captured by an artist directly from the world. My painting From the Island (right) is a faithful oil-paint copy of what Ektachrome’s color gumut and contrast range, constrained by a camera’s focal length, depth of field, and framing will do.
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? Didn’t bother Rembrandt when he painted the so-called “Night Watch.” At low light level, fewer colors are visible? So open fewer tubes of paint. But above all, see outside the camera’s box.

The difference goes much deeper than these technological limitations. A photograph is captured but a painting is created.
You tell me there are no mermaids? Never heard of pirate ships “manned” by women? A painting like my In Soundings (detail left) are out of reach of any camera even though the perspective grid in my mind certainly constrained its creation.

But is camera-free creation enough? At U-M in 1973, professor Phil Davis raised the bar for me. Looking at one of my photo prints, he asked, “what is there in this picture worth my time to look at?”
To be worth looking at, or buying, a painting must be worth more than the time, effort and materials. A painting’s visible effort asserts that either the subject was worth it or the artist wasted his time.
Once I got back to valuing the viewer’s time and attention, and my own, ideas started coming again.

Medieval and renaissance painters struggled with time and movement, but now photography has opened up our perceptions and options. By choosing the exposure time, the photographer captures and defines duration, blurring the motion of a waterfall or a turning wheel – or simply “freeze” them, as in Thin Ice (right).

Every painting I do reflects and feeds those perceptions.
The “lady pirates” painting also “freezes” a single instant – by choosing to create one, while indicating the previous few moments in the track of water drops from the lead weight. Commissioned works I do carry a record of time as part of their purpose. For these and other paintings, photography will continue to provide realism in one form or another.