Photography as Art
I received a very nice email from an artist in Burlington. It reads, in part:
I love your photos and a few of them are just begging to be painted. I am asking your permission to do that and would add your name as the photo credit for the source of the original.
I was pleased to grant him permission and I am surprisingly delighted that he took inspiration from my photography.
This is a very interesting technique and if done well can be stunning. I”™m not sure if the painter is painting over an enlarged copy of the photo, or merely using it as a hard copy reference to paint on a canvass. The former technique runs in our family in a sense.
At age 5, all of us in the Haskell family going back about 100 years or so have been photographed sitting on a bench. The picture was then blown up to about 10×20 inches. A portrait artist was then commissioned, (different ones over the years of course :-)) to paint right over the black and white photo, in colour, in oil. Overall the results are stunning and realistic. In no way can anyone tell there is a photograph underneath – it looks merely like an extremely accurate painted portrait. And of course it is not the artist”™s rendition of how large the facial figures should be, or in what proportion, as they have the photo to ‘trace’. I now have in our family a set of 6, going back to the early 1900’s, of my grandfather, my Father, my brother, myself, and my two children as my wife and I continued the tradition. A true rogue”™s gallery when you think about it.
I hope you get an opportunity to see the painting and perhaps you should get first right of refusal to buy it.
I have an artist friend who projects the colored slide onto the canvas and uses it as the basis for her initial charcoal sketch. The results of that are amazing, taking the best of reality and combining it with the eye and imagination of the artist.