do you look to painters for inspiration? (especially landscape)

swanlake1 · Oct 14, 2015

I've grown tired of going through photobooks and have recently turned to painters. Especially, with landscape, I'm looking at the Hudson River School and plan on reviewing the Old Masters. The difference is a lot of paintings are constructions and not actual scenes...so if the painter needs something good in the foreground they just paint it in. Still I find it refreshing to look at something new. Am wondering if anyone else is doing this and any suggestion on painters to check out?

Here's also a nice series on early Chinese landscape:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA56GyU-ZjNAhm_C2hZ2J0GLRVKySY_cB

Ron789 · Oct 14, 2015

Yes; I like the impressionists and post-impressionists and I'm trying to make photographs in a similar style. For example.... photo's with lots of grain, either by using very grainy film/developer combinations or by enlarging a small part of a negative to a large print, like the pointillism style that painters like Seurat developed. Or creating unsharp images either by moving the camera or combining in-focus and out-of-focus exposures or including moving subjects - mainly people - with long exposure times.
Every time I visit an exhibition of such painters it really inspires me!

Ko.Fe. · Oct 14, 2015

Here is no inspiration, but just uncontrolled or intended mimicking, IMO.

I never get tired of looking at Impressionists and Dali, Rubel and Rerikh. Was looking at it since I was teenager. By my own choice.

I never looked at photography books until recently.

I like HCB and GW because one came to photography from painting and another from studying of art.
I could see their education in their photography.

I also understand what I need to study some principles of art as unique individual, if I want to do it better in photography, not just looking at someone else paintings and photos.

Cheenese have same impressive paintings about rotting capitalism. Don't know if come in style or from one particular artist.

juan · Oct 14, 2015

Robert Henri.
Juan

gone · Oct 14, 2015

Not all landscape painter's works are constructions. Realists and photo realists paint what is in front of them, as do plein air painters. Corot is a good one to study, although he doesn't fit into those styles. You can make up things in the darkroom as easily as on a canvas, and should if something is weak in the pic. Ergo Ansel Adam's famous saying that he didn't take photographs, he made them. It's common practice for landscape photographers to have some good skies saved that they can overlay onto their shot if the weather is not cooperating that day.

The main thing painters can teach us are balanced compositions and tonal values. But what do I know, I'm just a rotting capitalist.

Or at least I aspire to be. We all need goals.

Mainecoonmaniac · Oct 14, 2015

Yes. All the aesthetic rules that govern painting applies to photography.

cliveh · Oct 14, 2015

Of course and my latest screen saver is this:-

swanlake1 · Oct 15, 2015

Thanks everyone for the great replies. Some excellent suggestions on landscape artists and I'm now going to raid my local library!

removed account4 · Oct 15, 2015

Mainecoonmaniac said:
Yes. All the aesthetic rules that govern painting applies to photography.

not to repeat mainecoonmaniac

but

don't limit yourself to landscape & photography books
look at architecture, ( man made ) landscape books, books on design, abstract expressionism
anything you can get your hands on, it will ALL relate to you making photographs

swanlake1 · Oct 15, 2015

jnanian said:
don't limit yourself to landscape & photography books

Agreed! Vintage postcards are a good source of inspiration for layout and design and (just to make this legit) I've heard that Walker Evans had a collection of 9,000 cards.

RobC · Oct 15, 2015

did the post-impressionsts look to photography for inspiration resulting in divisionism and pointillism? Personally I think quite possibly.

Mainecoonmaniac · Oct 15, 2015

Yes

jnanian said:
not to repeat mainecoonmaniac

but

don't limit yourself to landscape & photography books
look at architecture, ( man made ) landscape books, books on design, abstract expressionism
anything you can get your hands on, it will ALL relate to you making photographs

Visit museum and galleries too. My wife and I are going to San Francisco to see the Andy Goldworthy exhibit at the Presidio. As photographers, we need a good visual diet. Above all, turn off the tv.

Sirius Glass · Oct 15, 2015

I learned about lighting and composition from artists, but I do not get inspiration from their works.

Alan Klein · Oct 16, 2015

Good Hollywood movies are terrific to learn composition and lighting.

Sirius Glass · Oct 16, 2015

Alan Klein said:
Good Hollywood movies are terrific to learn composition and lighting.

Even some B movies can give lessons in film noir.

pdeeh · Oct 16, 2015

Alan Klein said:
Good Hollywood movies are terrific to learn composition and lighting.

This is quite an overlooked resource.

Hitchcock's cinematographer for instance was bordering on genius. I saw "strangers on a train" on a proper cinema screen, and some of the compositions were breathtaking. North by north west similarly

swanlake1 · Oct 16, 2015

Just saw "The Letter" with Bette Davis...some great scenes with light streaming through Venetian blinds.

eddie · Oct 16, 2015

I've been working on a series of cameraless/lensless images based on the work of abstract painters. The research has been a lot of fun (discovering artists I didn't know) and learning to see my photographs from a different perspective.

David Brown · Oct 16, 2015

swanlake1 said:
The difference is a lot of paintings are constructions and not actual scenes...

So are a lot of photographs.

cliveh · Oct 16, 2015

pdeeh said:
This is quite an overlooked resource.

Hitchcock's cinematographer for instance was bordering on genius. I saw "strangers on a train" on a proper cinema screen, and some of the compositions were breathtaking. North by north west similarly

But have you seen Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, as that will really teach you about composition. In fact if you watch all of his films you can see where Steven Spielberg was inspired for some of the filming in Jaws. Keep the camera still and let the boats move.

dpurdy · Oct 16, 2015

Andrew Wyeth landscape paintings often seem to me like they would make great photographs. Except I think in many cases if you just transformed the painting into a photo it would be too simple or lacking in interest. It sometimes seems to me that Wyeth is a photographer with the advantage of being able to do everything with paint. I am not sure if it is inspirational to look at it or maybe more a validation of a type of vision.
Sometimes I look at old portrait painters work and wish I could recreate the light and setting. I look at Samuel F B Morse paintings and think about that sometimes.

One of the mediums that I find inspirational is Pottery. I took several classes and sat at a wheel making pots a lot and found working with the round forms made me think about photography and want to work with round forms.

ColColt · Oct 17, 2015

When it came to portraits I was inspired the most by Rembrandt and Vermeer...especially Rembrandt.

swanlake1 · Oct 18, 2015

dpurdy said:
Andrew Wyeth landscape paintings often seem to me like they would make great photographs. Except I think in many cases if you just transformed the painting into a photo it would be too simple or lacking in interest.

Painters have the luxury of painting how we see things or want to see things. With two eyes, the world is wider and has more depth. So many times I've walked down a street and it looks wonderful and shoot the image only to get a very narrow block that looks tight and enclosed because of the single lens. Stepping forward and moving around can sometimes help, but it is never what I see.

I'm watching a series about early Chinese paintings and they paint seven foot scrolls with lots of different areas...a monk in a boat here, a path there, houses below, a mountain above. I think damn, I'm lucky if a get a boat in the image, let alone a path, a monk, a temple, a mountain!

Then there are things like David Lean movies. There's a caravan of people on elephants walking against a huge mountain. Looks wonderful and done with matte paintings in the background. With the camera, you could just never capture that image.

jjphoto · Oct 18, 2015

Jeffrey Smart

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Smart) and (https://www.google.com.au/search?q=...ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMI7-jspezMyAIVgxSUCh0J3wjV)

Jeffrey Smart painted industrial landscapes in arguably a style of his own, or at least one he made his own from around the 1960's to 2013 when he passed away. Most of his images seem like exercises in composition but almost always include people too. I'm not convinced his paintings necessarily had 'meaning' or were saying anything but I regularly found them moving none the less, and I've tried to see most of them. It's difficult to reproduce the colours in his paintings either online or in print so seeing them with your own eyes is worth doing for those in Australia as most of his major work is in the major Australian Galleries, and smaller places too like Castlemaine and Ballarat art galleries as well as TarraWarra Museum of Art (Healesville) for the Victorians here at APUG.

I consider Smarts paintings as perfect examples of composition as obviously he could place objects where ever he wanted rather than having to work with what's really there. I've always been inspired by his sense of composition and have found it filtered into my professional editorial car photography as well as private work over many years, and still does (see avatar for evidence!).

swanlake1 · Oct 19, 2015

I looked for Jeffrey Smart and found this:

http://www.wikiart.org/en/jeffrey-smart/approaching-storm-by-railway#close

It's great...very surprising, actually. The layout is exaggerated, but works...kind of like distilling down to the essence what you want to see in a landscape with good curves and a sharp layout.

I know what you mean about online reproduction lacking...most of what I love in B&W photography looks horrible online...better to go out and see it in person.

do you look to painters for inspiration? (especially landscape)

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