Please Sir, May I Have Some More Photographs?

Painters used to be ashamed to use photographs in their work and tried hard to hide the evidence.  An old painter I knew told me he went with the rest of the Frank Reilly illustration class one day to pay a call on a former student now working as an illustrator.  When they rang the studio doorbell, the illustrator yelled out, “Just a minute,” and they could hear the commotion inside as the illustrator quickly hid his Balopticon and other photographic paraphernalia before opening the door.  The idea was that if you had mastered drawing, color and composition, you didn’t need an opaque projector to trace an image from a drawing or a photograph onto your canvas.  Those days are long gone.

There’s a very entertaining website called, “Artist and Studio,” where the guy in charge posts two or three new images every day of artists and their work, their studio environments and their models.  The archival photographs of artists and their studios are particularly interesting, although there do seem to be more images posted of Frida Kahlo than are seemly.  But what I can’t help noticing is that all the contemporary figurative work posted on this site is photographic in nature.  Just look at the hands they paint.  No painter in the history of painting was great at painting the knuckles on every finger.  So they didn’t.  Besides, they understood the obvious, that knuckles aren’t the most attractive part of the human anatomy, and add very little to the overall beauty of the painting.  A few masterful portrait painters, like Sir William Orpen, could draw everything so well that they accepted the challenge of painting hands, with knuckles and veins, and won.   That was yesterday, though, when painters could draw and paint quickly and accurately from life.  Today if you want to paint hands, you normally take a photograph.  Knuckles are no problem for a camera.  Do you think today’s young kids can draw and paint hands better than Sargent or Orpen?  No way.  But they seem to take great delight in copying every knuckle on every finger as recorded by the camera.  

Albrecht Durer’s famous pen and ink drawing of praying hands is about all you get of any note from the Old Masters.  And you can bet that he had a hard time drawing them so accurately from life.  

Beyond the knuckles, however, if the painting looks like a high-resolution photograph then it was copied from a photograph.  But it’s getting harder to tell now, because so many realist painters are painting pictures from life with all the accurate, trivial detail that only a camera wants to record, without establishing a strong focal point, and ignoring painterly concerns such as the atmospheric effect on values, color and spatial relationships.

So it’s impossible to write about contemporary realist painting without mentioning how much it has been influenced by photography, consciously or not.  Here’s the basic timeline from the 19^th Century on.

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929)

Horses at the Water Trough, 1884

Degas Photograph and Painting, “After the Bath”

Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

First we have oil painters using photographs as mere reference to help them with some details they can’t paint from life, to paint posthumous portraits or to experiment with them just for their novelty.   Dagnan-Bouveret and Degas are often cited here, although  many other famous artists used them on rare occasions.  Even bravura painters like Sorolla are thought to have used photos in their work, but its been hard to pin the tail on their donkey.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942), Queen Victoria and

her Great Grandson, 1936

Then we have artists copying or freely interpreting photographs from newspapers or magazines for their “original art.”  Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is often cited here.  Sickert was an eccentric, cosmopolitan artist who influenced many 20th Century modernists with his varied non-traditional painting methods, including the use of grids on canvas to quickly work interpretively from drawings, prints and photographs.  Early on in his career he was a good friend of both Whistler and Degas, taking the latter's advice to work in the studio and avoid "the tyranny of nature."  He had a more than casual interest in the dark side of human behavior, so much so that in 2002, Patricia Cornwell, a crime novelist, identified him as Jack the Ripper in her book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed."  Her theory was good for a laugh at the time.

John Howard Sanden, President George W. Bush, 2012,
 The White House

Then we have oil painters copying photographs to create paintings such as official portraits, because the subjects can’t be bothered with the boring business of sitting (or standing) for the many hours necessary to do the job from life; and wildlife paintings, because it’s hard to get a duck in flight to hold the pose.  Any contemporary portrait painter or wildlife artist fits in here.  And who really knows how to draw a duck or a wildebeest well, anyway, other than Walt Disney artists.

Richard Estes, Ansonia, 1977, Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have photo-realists using an airbrush or soft-hair brushes to copy photographs precisely, or “interpret” them ever so slightly, to make monumental paintings that look to the naked eye exactly like the photograph, down to the smooth emulsion surface.  Think Richard Estes here.

Chuck Close, “Phil,” 1969. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 108 × 84 in.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Then we have artists making photorealistic paintings of giant heads on canvas without actually copying the photograph, but by systematically applying tiny little brush marks grid by grid by grid by grid.  These marks are only revealed upon “Close” inspection.

Rackstraw Downes, "Sprowl Bros. Lumber Yard, Searsmont, ME", 1978-80
Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 43 3/8 in., Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Then we have artists going outdoors to copy a commonplace industrial landscape spread out in front of them, for several weeks worth of work, to create a modest-sized painting that ends up looking exactly like a photograph, until a 30-page essay is produced to prove that what you see is not, in fact, a photograph, but the illusion of a photograph with all kinds of artistic license behind the process, which makes it much more interesting than an actual photograph would have been, you see.  Think Rackstraw Downes.

Stephen Hannock, “The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded,”

2000, Acrylic, alkyd and oil glazes with collage elements on

canvas, 96x144 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

At about the same time, we have artists using power sanders, collage elements and all sorts of reference material to create slick-surfaced monumental studio “paintings” that look exactly like giant digital photographs when hung on the requisite museum walls, but which reveal a lot of indecipherable scribbling of gibberish when you put your nose right up to them, and which are accompanied by a 30-page essay to prove that what you see was not, in fact, copied from a photograph, but was created with all kinds of serious artistic invention and hard work to give the illusion of a photograph or a movie still, you understand! That must be Stephen Hannock.

Well those are just some of the major players in the game.  Then we have thousands of other artists cheerfully working from photographs or computer images as a matter of course in all media and genres today to create “original art” in sizes that actually fit on a living room wall.  There is no shortage of photographic images to inspire creativity today, so we see plenty of paintings that have the whiff of photography or computer-generated imagery about them.

I wonder about those big photographic paintings that everybody raves about.  Is doing something really difficult and quirky on a monumental scale, with or without unusual painting tools, worth anything as a lasting work of art if the only goal is to give to it the convincing illusion of a photograph?  I certainly don’t think so.

Jeff Wall’s photograph “Men waiting,” 2006, Silver gelatine print

103 1/8 x 152 3/4 in., The Guardian, London,

© Jeff Wall / Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

Besides, those giant photographic prints we now often see on museum walls look mighty impressive themselves. Working big is no longer an advantage for the representational painter.

By the way, does putting your nose near the surface of one of those massive photo-like paintings to see all the indecipherable little bits embedded there make it somehow a deeply moving emotional experience you will cherish for the rest of your life?  Would you like a reduction made of it so you can put it above your living room couch – or perhaps a little postcard as a souvenir of your visit to the museum?  I seriously doubt it.  Scale is everything for these guys.  But my opinion doesn’t matter, no it really doesn’t matter, matter, matter…because I just want to paint pretty little pictures from life, and I’m not even very good at that, in my own humble opinion, verified a thousand times over by my perspicacious ability to see how much better others have handled the same subject matter.

No, my opinion and that of a few other diehard traditionalists doesn’t matter.  The revolution has been won.  Art workers in the digital age have united.  They are determined to cast off the shackles of whimsical, intemperate Mother Nature once and for all.  Iris, hence away with the accursed, antiquated practice of wrestling with nature to paint pictures that actually look and feel like the real thing as seen through the lens of the human eye.  Such pictures tend to excite raw emotion in viewers and will not be allowed in the brave new world of high-definition, digitalized visual reality.  Let a decree go forth throughout the land that the only representational art that will be permitted is that which will look like a photograph, whether actually painted from a photograph, extracted from a fertile imagination, or created from life with no other purpose than rendering by hand an accurate snapshot of the subject, composed as if seen through a camera’s viewfinder, with no indication of nature’s depth and breadth beyond the borders of the canvas.   

I have no objection to photographs, per se.  I took some good ones myself before I started to paint 30 years ago, but I haven’t touched a drop since.  Look at it this way:  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s (photographs and computer imagery) and render unto God that which is God’s (painting).   Maybe you don’t agree.  So all right, let’s just keep them “separate but equal.”  Don’t say I’m not willing to compromise!