Should I work from photographs? Many artists do, but I usually advise caution and try to avoid solely copying photographic images.
I have a number of reasons, but the main one is ‘selection’.
As an artist working from life – landscape, figure, still-life, whatever – you make selections. You decide what’s important and what you want to focus upon. The way you work aims to draw the viewer’s attention to something specific.
Sometimes these are conscious decisions, but more often than not they are subconscious or intuitive. The artist ‘sees’ something that sparks the imagination, then intuition takes over in the handling of the materials.
One of the key skills for an artist to develop is selectivity.
With a photograph, the photographer has made the selection. Maybe not what the artist might have chosen, bcause photographers have different objectives.
The way we look at a scene is not the same way a camera does. Our eyes are constantly moving – being attracted to something of interest or rejecting other areas. We build up an impression based upon many stimuli as we view a scene, a room or a person – in fact our whole world.
The camera is fixed and records all that is in front of it with equal clarity (let’s ignore depth of field for now!).
Capture the moment and more
As a tool of record, the camera is king and that’s why many artists choose it. It’s a backup for our flakey memory and allows us to reconstruct an experience many years after. And there lies a key. Art is more concerned with expressing an experience, and a glance at a snapshot can revive that experience, with all its emotional context.
Where I suggest the photography needs to be used with care is when it simply supplies a subject to be copied. I have seen aspiring artists take an image and begin copying from one corner all the way down to the opposite corner.
If the artist is working to develop their analytic skills this may be a worthwhile exercise. But it should be a conscious decision.
Photography and painting mix well
There is another approach where some really creative artists combine painting and photography to produce amazing works.
Perhaps an outstanding example is David Hockney who has long worked with the camera and is renowned for his amazing photographic collages. I strongly recommend checking them out.
There are many others creating great works, blurring the borders between paint and camera including:
Such artists are really worth exploring as they are not working from photographs, but with photography.
