Real or Not
I started taking pictures of the places where I paint. These pictures should serve as a document to the ‘reality’ which is set out before my painterly eye. After my experience in China, where I had to paint exclusively from photographs, I thought that I might try to use photography to give me more input into the painting especially in finishing the job.
I don’t like painting from a photo. I have never liked what I see in the photo; it seems ‘reality’ already dressed up. I know that the photographic process does something to the colours which renders them different from reality. I also know that certain optical functions that have to do with complementary colours don’t happen in a photograph. Painters have used these complementary effects in paint to ‘construct’ a natural optical process. So the idea of incorporating a ‘picture’ into the scheme of an ‘enpleinair’ work, in my opinion, compromises the work.
Let me explain. We can classify a human experience with reality according to many different categories: our senses, our psyche, our emotions, memories, according to who we share the experience with, even a virtual reality. Each of these ways is different and changes according to the individual who is having the experience.
I’m interested in my experience with reality through paint. Now I can receive input on many different levels, as I said before, but, eventually I’m looking for the RIGHT relationship; something that does JUSTICE to what I am experiencing. Now that’s a difficult word but, for me it means allowing what I am capable of rendering to run freely with my desire to create something new.
The technique which I use is the means by which the result of the piece is related to the experience. All of the other levels of experience are secondary to the technique which in turn, is only used to my advantage in the measure that I am free of its limitations. This is what I mean by justice; I’m doing justice to myself (through the experience) and to the piece (through the technique).
So photography gets in the way of purely painting what you see. The technique is no longer free to the experience that you have before your eyes; and all of the poetic justice that you can allow. Unfortunately, now the eye calls back to a frozen moment in time and space; a moment that allows infinite study, measurement, comparison. But that infinite moment is a slave to the liberty of your hand, at the loss of the inspirational moment of light before your eyes.
