[#9] Painting a Photograph
Oct 19, 2020
Two words that do not often go together, painting and photograph. Two separate mediums, one by an artist and one by a photographer, the creator is labeled. Or, are they separate? Honestly, I prefer to be labeled an artist. I imagine how I want something to look, and then I create it. The difference is my strokes on a canvas are from a camera instead of a brush, and I use light instead of paint. Here is how I paint a photograph.
Painting involves using a brush to glide along a canvas or instead place a dot or smudge. All of these motions of hand and brush create an image. My approach is to watch the motion around me and put my canvas up to record the motion. Sometimes I want to stop everything in it’s tracks because the anticipation of what comes next or what just happened is my focus. Other times, I want to show you an entire slice of time compounded together so you have the same feeling I have standing there, participating in time.
This slice of time was actually twenty-four seconds. I watched the waves come in. High tide was pushing to shore. The water ambled on and hit the rocks splashing up and over, draining as the tide returned to the deep. Now and then a lazy wave seemed to get just enough “oomph” to splash me where I stood. As a larger wave built and crested just before the end of the groin, I pressed the shutter. The water started painting as it came towards me. I could see out to the horizon and the clouds above me headed that way. Twenty-four seconds later, the shutter closed. Below is where I set everything up, the display on the back showing you this image just after I captured it (taken with my iPhone).
With the advance of computers, any digital image can be swirled and blurred, pixelated, smoothed and today, even slices of focus can be stitched together to give unreal depths of field. Those manipulations have their place, but not in my art. I prefer to capture the motion when I press the shutter, or capture the lack of motion. The creativity comes at the moment the exposure is taken.
As light from the ocean reflects the mood of the sky, sweeping in and out, the camera sensor is literally painted by the light. The streaks and colors light up the pixels in the same way a brush stroke lays paint. The key is not only what exposure to use, but also what kind of camera system. Watercolor painters use sable hair brushes and old world Grumbacher paints on cotton pressed papers. You’ve seen the art and the tools make a subtle, but important, difference. My lenses are the brush, and my camera the canvas. I use a medium format Leica system with glass made to pair with the camera - it all works together and is more than the sum of the parts. I use filters and f/stops to control the light. My tools make the subtle difference allowing me to spend time using my creativity to paint a photograph.