Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Photorealism









The first image is Avocets. The second is October Evening, Algonquin Park. The third is Sliding away No. 2. The fourth is First Snow. The first, second and fourth are self explanatory. The third is so named because the shed is slowly sliding into the swamp (sort of like life passing, if you don't mind the swamp metaphor).


I wanted to say something about photorealism in painting. I have a great deal of admiration for the technical skill that this usually involves and can appreciate the work of Robert Bateman and many others. On a few occasions I have incorporated photorealistic elements in works that as a whole are not photorealistic, partly for the practice and partly to help establish a focal point. However, I tend to prefer interpretation of a scene. This can involve changing the composition, simplifying it by leaving things out, changing or exaggerating colours or trying to get a specific effect of light (the hardest thing for me, personally). Photorealism does not preclude any of this but it does place limits on what one can do. My first effort at a photorealistic element was Avocets, the first image at the beginning of this post. The birds were the best I could do with photorealism at the time (it was done about six months after I started painting), the rest of the picture is just filler.
I will give the last word on the subject to Emily Carr. "We may copy something as faithfully as the camera, but unless we bring to our picture something additional - something creative - something of ourselves - our picture does not live." (Taken from Emily Carr, a Biography, by Maria Tippett, Stoddart, 1979, page 193.)

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