Paintings from Photographs

[Joe VanCleave]

Here's a topic I've been meaning to post for some time, and was inspired just this last weekend, after having spent several hours (and a few $), at Weems ArtFest in Abq.

BTW, I post to various photo-related foru, and so decided APUGer's would be the best to discuss this one (I hope.)

I see lots of paintings (western, scenic, etc) in various genres, and many times I can identify the source for the painting was a photograph. Often the clue is composition, but many times it's also the effect of limited DOF; for instance, a full-length portrait of a person, in an outdoor setting, and you can just see that the painter rendered the DOF the same way a lens would: increasingly out of focus the further from the subject. A 'plein air' painter would have chosen to paint the background soft perhaps, to attract the viewer's eye to the foreground subject, but the effect is not the same as copying the way a refractive lens optically renders objects.

So, do you often see paintings that are obviously rendered from a photograph? Can you easily spot the distinction between a painting from a photo and rendering a scene directly from the eye/optic nerve/visual cortex?

BTW, I enjoy viewing well-crafted paintings, and art in general; the more I've studied both photography and painting the more I can tell when one is trying to imitate the other. I think a well-made painting created from the mind of the artist, rather than copied from a photograph, looks very different from a photograph; even if it is a 'realistic' style of painting. Composition is different, as is focus, just for starters.

I'd be interested to hear about your experiences.

~Joe

 

[jovo]

My wife, a painter, printmaker, and photographer, sometimes uses photographs as references for her paintings. The distinction she draws in doing so ( more than a century old practice btw) is that she recognizes what the lens does differently than the eye, and chooses to either incorporate those differences or not quite deliberately. She's had a lot of fun pointing out those lens derived elements in other peoples paintings to me, and I've come to recognize how commonplace it has actually become. It drives her crazy when artists do that.

 

[MenacingTourist]

When I see a painting copied from a photo I always think "lazy". For me it's not even a painting but rather a copy of a photograph and what's the point of that?

Photography used as reference is just fine. It's all about the execution.

Alan.

 

[Mateo]

I got into photography because I was taking allot of reference photos for painting. I guess painting from photos could be lazy but I used photography as a way of learning to see certain things that are hard to see such as the way water reflects things when it's not perfectly still.

It's kinda tricky to assume something comes from a photograph just because it has elements that are normally photographic visually. Photography did not invent out of focus rendering and different angles of view. If you do allot of plein air you get to be really aware of the choice you make in deciding how much of that big world to squeeze onto whatever canvas format you have. In fact when I started getting into photo the idea of a normal lens was just plain stupid to me. Making things out of focus, well blurry, is just another way of directing what is important and what ain't. Admittedly a petzval looking swirl I ain't ever seen before there was a petzval lens photo to copy.

I think photography is just another tool like the rule of thumb or a filbert brush.


This is an etching that I made from reference photographs...sketching hair blowing is fun but not always the thing you're looking for.

 

[MenacingTourist]

If we really want to open up a can of worms we could start in on the illustration vs. fine art debate Personally, my painting is 99.9% illustration (at least the way I see it) and most of the illustrators I know use a TON of photo reference.

Mateo's etching to me looks like illustration rather than fine art. I think it may be the photo reference used that lends that feel. I also really like it.

I guess to tie this in to photography...editorial shots or somthing you'd see in a magazine that goes with an article (Annie Liebowitz and Richard Avedon) to me feels like illustration. Weston's Pepper or John Sexton's work feels like fine art.

I can also think of several cross-overs and I have favorites all over the spectrum.

Alan.

 

[Vaughn]

Well, my mother-in-law gave us a painting she did from a photo my wife had taken. It was true to the photo -- down to the darker corners where the lens shade vingetted the image when my wife used the short end of her zoom.

Vaughn

 

[Steve Smith]

I went to an exhibition a few years ago which was put on to show the work of the entrants to a newspaper's art competition. A lot of the pictures were obviously copied from photographs due to the limited depth of field which had been copied.

The strangest images though were a couple which had obviously started as photographs and had then been modified with some of Photoshop's 'artistic' filters such as stained glass effect and watercolour effect. They had then been copied onto canvas.

Despite this, the quality of the whole exhibition was very high.


Steve.

 

[mabman]

My local camera club recently had a presentation by a painter/photographer/composer who was also an art professor at one of the local universities. His site is here. (Frankly, I don't care terribly for his photography - I don't see anything unique in it - the "Logan Ave." series, for instance - but his painting speciality is "Realism", and he does use photographs as references.) The subject of his presentation was "Photography and Art".

He focused on painters who used photographic-like technique, such as Vermeer, who it seems from the perspectives and detail in his paintings likely used a camera obscura in some fashion as a reference. His point was this in no way detracted from their skills as painters - they still had to have skills in paint colour creation and manipulation to make a painting work, and did some things that were clearly "painterly", as he put it, although the overall look was fairly photographic. Another point he made was that photographic technology or its precursors, such as lenses and cameras obscura, allowed painters to explore different styles and techniques and perspectives - something they wouldn't have necessarily been able to do otherwise.

So, ultimately, photography and painting are complimentary, not mutually exclusive - paintings from (or inspired by) photographs can be just as good as something done freehand, and photographers can be inspired by the "old masters".

 

[dpurdy]

I don't see the problem. Art is art and it should be without rules. Use whatever tools you want however you want as long as you aren't stealing someone elses work and copy right. Paint has it's own qualities just as photographic materials do. It is unavoidable that painters of today are informed by photography. Everyone has been inundated with photographic imagery. I think it could be considered worse for photographers to copy photographers work. Photography is way too informed by photography, it would be better if it was informed by painting. But it is all better forgotten about and artists allowed to do what ever they want.. except steal anothers work.

 

[Videbaek]

Mateo -- that's a graphically good picture you posted, thanks for that. You might be interested in investigating APUG's sister site, the hybrid site, where pictures like this one are the point. A vigorous cross-hatching style you have, I see the influence of bandes dessinées and pen & ink drawing (nothing wrong with that, au contraire, BD is a powerful and immensely interesting medium in the right hands).
To the point of painting from photographs... Paintings made straight from photographs are easily spotted, a kind of genre unto itself. Usually low-grade commercial work (send us your photo, we'll make a painting of it for xx dollars) of arts & crafts fairs. Sometimes goes a bit higher up the artistic ladder. Using photos as reference material for painting goes back to the introduction of photography -- some surprising names used photography a lot for plein-air research work before going into the studio to make the real thing. Painters have always been practical. The point is how photos are used for this purpose. Few serious painters would paint looking at a photo as sole reference. Drawings are much more important source material, the artist's direct and personal notes of the experience in the field containing the essence of impressions of colour, light, mood, form. The camera is a mechanical intermediary, useful as a documentary tool recording the interrelationships of one form with another, relative sizes, distance, perspective (sometimes useful when perspectival drawings cannot be made). Generally, in painting one wants to work in direct and pure relationship between the subject & inspiration and the hand working right on the canvas -- this is the energy and interest of painting, why it is the greatest of the two-dimensional visual arts. Anything, including photography, which can make this relationship work with the greatest possible directness and purity, will be used by the artist without qualms.

 

[Videbaek]

About Vermeer and the camera obscura -- absolutely nothing is known about Vermeer's life and artistic practice. Only a handful of paintings are definitely attributed to him, a handful more are disputed. The theory that he used a camera obscura, a device known in Vermeer's era and before, is based on the idea that the photographic verisimilitude seen in his paintings just could not have been produced without the aid of a camera obscura. The argument in full (can't remember the name of the proponent now) is quite convincing in and of itself, looking at Vermeer's paintings in isolation. They are photographically correct, in perspective and the relative size of forms, in every detail. However, the same can be said of umpteen other Dutch and Flemish painters of the era. And the same can be said of the great Italian renaissance painters. By the mid-1550s, the conventions of perspective were entirely mastered and formalized. Before fuzz grew on their chins, painting apprentices had the conventions of vanishing points and fore-shortening drummed into them and practised them to perfection. As did Vermeer. He didn't need a camera obscura. Perhaps he used one, as was so dramatically shown in the lovely movie "Girl With A Pearl Earring" where Colin Firth reveals one of his sacred secrets, in the form of the lacquered wooden box of the camera obscura, to Scarlett Johansson. My own feeling is that he did not. He could paint with photographic precision straight from nature, as could any of the less gifted painters of his day.

 

[Katharine Thayer]

About Vermeer and the camera obscura -- absolutely nothing is known about Vermeer's life and artistic practice. Only a handful of paintings are definitely attributed to him, a handful more are disputed. The theory that he used a camera obscura, a device known in Vermeer's era and before, is based on the idea that the photographic verisimilitude seen in his paintings just could not have been produced without the aid of a camera obscura. The argument in full (can't remember the name of the proponent now).....

Not sure if this is who you mean, but David Hockney has been a famous proponent of this argument, whether with regard to Vermeer specifically I don't recall.
Katharine

 

[Joe VanCleave]

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful replies. I didn't mean to imply that there was necessarily anything wrong with painting from photos; rather, I'm interested in the observation that there seems to be fundamental differences in the way that cameras see the world as compared to the human eye/nerve/brain. And through understanding those differences perhaps I can come to a better understanding of how photography works. And painting.

I suppose I'm still curious about the nature of vision and "seeing" - and all that the term implies, including the mystics who were termed "seers", etc.

As for Vermeer, there's also a book, "Vermeer's Camera", in which Philip Steadman has done some additional work on the subject that's a bit of a different take than Hockney's. Both are great reading, however. I think Hockney's theory is that small concave mirrors were used, prior to lenses, which gave a small field of view of the projected image on canvas; thus the painting was put together more like a collage, in sections. Whereas Steadman's theory is more related to lenses, and wider fields of view through using small camera obscuras that were able to project the entire scene onto canvas.

~Joe

 

[bjorke]

I hear all paintings are true unless the painter used a computer

 

[Videbaek]

<I hear all paintings are true unless the painter used a computer< I guess you're referring to "digital painting" which is a term gaining currency these days. I don't know, I haven't seen a single example yet of truly well made "Wacom tablet + digital photo collage" work. A very interesting area, just waiting for somebody to do something with it.

 

[Removed Account]

Next thing you know, Epson will be coming out with inks based on linseed oil...

- Justin