The Book “The painting of modern life” has helped me to understand the relationship between photography and painting and the concepts and ideas that emerge when you translate a photograph into a painting. Within my work, I am painting from a collage of many different photographs and reinventing it as a painting. I was struggling to put this into words and this book has helped clarify my ideas.
“In a Painting based on a photograph, the very act of remaking infers that the photograph was not sufficient” – (Herbert, Pg 43)
I was encouraged to think about how the photographs I have been working from were insufficient and why I felt they should be translated into painting. The photographic collages, are many different images, all taken from different places and brought together, painting them allows them to exist in the same image and highlights the fact that these different images are not separate from each other, echoing the reality of our environment. The images are repetitive and of a similar colour palette. I have painted them with a sense of vibrancy, an attraction making them harder to overlook, I have also employed different painting techniques to keep them fresh and keep peoples interest in each image as each is a different viewing experience.
“You can’t take a painting as with a photograph, you make a painting” – (Bakargiev, Pg.43)
I have come to realise that mindlessly copying a photograph may be skilful but doesn’t change the image in terms of it’s impact or concept apart from giving it a sense of importance as you have chosen it to paint. Making a painting takes a lot of decisions and it is important to allow the painting to tell you what it needs.
“Photography is commonly used as an accurate means of picturing the world, these artists confronted photographic images as a way of questioning the means by which we represent reality” –
This quote made me think about how a photograph is dubbed to be an accurate representation of our world, a real image. When in reality, an image of a beautiful landscape could be highly censored. It looks picturesque and beautiful but in reality there could have been a polluting power station or a cut down forest just next to it. My work addresses this.
“creating inspiring paintings that reinvent our images of the world”
I have reinvented my images, through use of colour and painting techniques, adding an attractiveness and vibrancy that draws in the viewer and exposes them to the reality that our beautiful natural world that people hold nostalgia for exists in the same image as environmental harm. I have reinvented the image to say more to the viewer.
“their paintings not only addressed the world in which they lived but also the phenomenon of how it was represented”
Throughout my practice, I have been working with ideas surrounding how the world is represented. This quote made me think about how I realised that images of environmental harm were easy to overlook and that I had to think of a new way to represent the world that highlighted the beauty that was being lost and the damage that was being done. When an issue doesn’t necessarily directly affect you it is easy to ignore and representing the harm as a miserable negative aspect of the world captured the attention of no one. Changing how it was represented and exploring an attraction and vibrancy to the work and contrasting it with the beautiful land people cling onto and don’t overlook definitely is more successful.
“Ultimately, rather than receiving a death sentence from the camera’s invention, painting encompasses photography to redefine and extend it’s conceptual reach”
The fact that I have painted these images, gives them a sense of importance in itself, I have chosen these as a worthy subject to depict. The images didn’t stop me painting them, they allowed me to reimagine them and give the viewer a sense of the different elements of our environment. I painted them to make them more poignant, to give the images an attraction that couldn’t be overlooked and therefore conceptually making them stronger than the image itself.
GemmaSchiebeFineArt III 