Artistic influences

Crop Circles  (from the series: Ethereal Images)

I find that I am influenced by many things, experiences and occurances. Some influences are very overt and obvious, others not so and maybe latent memories, that unconsious stuff.

For my series Bad Trip – Sad Trip, to me, the initial artisitc intent was an obvious photographic documentation of folk art that was being expressed regionally as road side memorials. Kinda simple, so I thought. Later I came to remember a child hood experience driving with my father. Then further complicated by the fact that my father has since passed away, but not due to a highway accident, but due to other decisions he had made early in his life and did not know the far reaching consequences. So in a way the memorials were: drink, then drive, then kill or die and the consequences to those still alive.

Another series that has been drifting along is my Etherial Images, including the image Crop Circles above. To me the obvious input is that I travel by air frequently and one way to pass the time is to sit at a window seat and take photographs, of clouds, of the ground, etc. Kill some time in a delightful way. I’ve been doing this for many years and have enjoyed the images privately for some time. This image Crop Circles may be the pivital photograph to the series.  I have keep reviewing it and saw that it did not confirm to very many photographic rules, there was still something about it (not neat and square, edges runnin off, etc). So I have had this image laying about and I have keep coming back to it. Then I realized the connection, this was like the feeling I had looking at Richard Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993) paintings from his series Ocean Park. I do not neccessarily think of my image as being Abstract-Expressionsim as was Diebenkorn’s work, but the more I look at, the more it does appear to take that look on.

Thus I have started to go back to my other flight images and I realize that a series has started to come together. I think that there is a body of work hidden amongst this. I find that certain compositions and images start to repeat, as though I have made a certain image once, I still keep coming back to it again and again. The may be a couple of other “Diebekorn” influenced images in this series, but it will not a repeat of Ocean Park. Sometimes it is just good to know what might be influencing you so that you can move on from there.

Best regards, Doug

Should an artist paint from a photograph?

Okay, I have to admit, I am still under the weather with this flu thing, so when I was doing some crusing through some blogs, I came across this question; Should an artist paint from a photograph? Duh?? I guess so if you are such a crappy photographer and you can’t get it right the first time.

Then it got better, as one artist claimed that since a photograph is “dead”, he created life by now painting the image. Don’t look now but I think someone has a tiny messiah complex. I needed this to help lighten me up today.

Artist draw inspiration from many souces; dreams, experiences, songs, poetry to name a few. So I guess a fair question is, did they make the photograph from which they are painting or did they find a photograph of something that they want to paint? For fifteen years of painting, even with over ten years of prior photography, I painted what I saw, my memory or experienced, I did not paint from photographs. But that was me.

There are some painting mediums, such as oil which can be incrediable slow to work with. Especially for larger complex works. So a reference image to help with your recall may not be so bad. But to photograph of an image is a first order of observation of that image, while making an artwork from the image in the photograph is a second order of observation. To start with a second order observation, you do not experience all of the environmental conditions of the thing itself; temperature, humidity, smells or textures as examples.

But that a photograph is a dead object and a painting is alive? Oh my oh my.

Best regards, Doug