Some earlier work:

Another value study.

A bit rough, yes.

But there's something about it I like very much.

Work done since December 2008

The couple on the bench was from a photo by Paul Grand with his permission.

The Use of Photos

I don't see anything at all wrong with using photographs, but it feels like an important part of the creative process is being left out. Especially when what I am doing, basically, is copying the photo as it is.
That's my problem, I copy the photo literally. I can't seem to see beyond the photo. It's influence is too strong.
What is there already is speaking too loudly for me to hear anything else.
I adopt the composition, colors,shading...and paint what I see.
Sometimes the results are quite good...especially when the photo I have chosen is well composed already. Here's one called The Red Slipper

But I'm missing out on a big part of the fun and enjoyment that come from resolving the issues from the very beginning. The matters of composition, shading, color, perspective ..all those issues that are (somewhat) resolved already by the photo.

I think this became most clear to me as a result of trying to copy a Cezanne still life. ( see above) As I worked, I began to see the decisions he made on the canvas.How he took the raw elements of cloth, pot, dish, apples...threw them all up in the air and juggled them into an arrangement that no photo could ever approximate.

Even if I were an expert copyist and was able to re-produce what Cezanne had painted, I would not be an 'artist'. I'd be a painter or a copyist...but not an artist.

I want to claim all the credit for what I produce. I don't want to share it with the camera.!

Part Two

Well thanks Aunt Fay, but there's a problem.

That method didn't teach me how to draw...it taught me how to copy!

My eye became trained to see shapes, curves, lines...but I still didn't know how to draw an object
I saw in front of me.

So, I guess it wasn't surprising that when I started to paint, I turned to photos to paint from.

I could print out a photo, make a grid, transfer it to my canvas and paint.

It worked pretty well as far as I could tell.

I fell into the habit of painting from photos.

And 'habit' is the operative word here because, in fact, I became addicted to the use of photos....to the point where I wasn't sure I could paint from life at all.


I read in a book recently:
' A photo invariably pulls the painter toward it's own color direction which often is far less interesting than the color solution the painter invents....You are a more responsive and intentional colorist than the camera will ever be...'

I think there is a lot of truth to this quotation.


So I decided to take a class in Still Life painting even though I have done a lot of still lifes from photos. I need to train my eye to see the real thing and paint it!
The first class was very basic, of course. Brush shapes, media, supports etc. We also were given a strip of paper with 9 gradations of value from white to black and were asked to copy it using our oils. An exercise in values.







And during our next class we painted a white sphere on a white tabletop lit from the side ....
Such a simple exercise but I can't tell you how happy and proud I was when I finished and saw that it looked pretty good. I was able to do it without a photo !
In a way it felt like my first real painting. So odd.

There is really no reason why I needed a photo to look at. The same scene was right there in front of me on the table as would be in a photo.
But for some reason, I didn't trust that it would be quite the same. Maybe I wanted to use a photo instead of 'the real thing' because both the photo and the canvas were flat and I knew that if I just transferred what I saw on one flat surface to another, it would be sure to work.
I just didn't trust my powers of observation of the 3 dimensional objects before me on the table.
What pleased me so much about this exercise is it proved I didn't really need a photo after all.

Day One

First day of my blog.

I started painting in the Autumn of 2008 and it has been the focus of my life since then.
Oils.
This seems to have come out of nowhere.
I never painted before this.
But there is an antecendent to my new found skill:

Picture it....
Hull Massachusetts, summer by the shore.
It's too rainy to go swimming so I'm on the wide front porch of my grandparents' summer house with nothing to do but watch the chilly fog rolling in from the sea. Aunt Fay shows me how, by making a grid of horizontal and vertical lines across a panel of my comic book, I can, section by section, reproduce the figure of Archie on another larger grid drawn on newsprint. With this grid, I can reproduce any contour !
I file this technique away for later use and take it out again when I am ill in bed for long periods of time in my early teens.
I copied Winslow Homer scenes of men in fishing boats.
Rockwell Kent's illustrations for Moby Dick on shirt cardboards.
They were pretty good, too.
I don't know where they are now..put away when I went off to school and lost.