A photograph offers so many (and so obvious) advantages as a source for painting as to raise the question: why would any responsible person even consider painting a landscape outdoors?
I’ve been thinking about this while painting outside lately. I think the answer comes down to this: I need to ask, what is it that I am painting when I paint a landscape?
Is it the landscape?
Or is it my being there, my reaction to the landscape?
What I realized, thinking about the question in these terms, is that there is one place that photography fails predictably. Photographs record what a place looked like at a particular moment. They don’t record what it felt like to be there. This is a very big difference.
If my goal were to record the exact position of the trees or the particular pattern of the clouds or the blur in the distance when I focused on a dandelion nearby, the photograph would be the right choice for source material. If my goal were to convey the type of aesthetic that a camera offers — entirely different from natural vision, if you consider the question — the photograph would be the right choice. But those aren’t my goals. My goal is to paint in the context of my reaction to the landscape itself. I’m sure of that part. So for me, the answer is clear: paint in the landscape itself, paint outside, get wet when it rains. That’s the way I need to do it.
To paint outside is to accept some severe constraints: paint during the day (if the subject is daytime), in the right kind of whether, deal with the people who pass by, paint not too far from home as to prohibit regular work, etc etc etc. It helps to think of these constraints as choices.
Karl, depending on your goals and preferred working methods, you could paint entirely from life, entirely from photos, or a combination of the two.
If you’re finishing each painting in one session, “from life” probably works great. If you are working on each piece over the course of days or weeks, there is the option of also taking reference photos and continuing what you started outdoors in the studio.
Even before photography, landscape painters like Constable would do studies from life and then paint in the studio. I don’t think painting finished works outdoors became common until the mid-19th century.
Karl,
Was that bait deliberate? Perhaps we should de-bate whether the photographer’s tools for conveying feeling are nil or impoverished compared to a painter’s. An old but undying debate.
But at the moment, I have to agree with your rationale for working from nature, since I share it (plus photographers have no choice in the matter). But moving from the artist to the viewer, how do you think your felt experience is manifested in the painting? Or to put it in terms of an experiment: how could someone tell the difference between a painting you did outdoors and one you did from a photograph?
Karl,
Photographs also accentuate the emotive power of its subjects – I think it just depends on the subject . You are right when you talk about your experience with nature – which is but one type of a subject.
I plan to talk about this in my next post.
I often paint buildings.
I work from the subejct. I`d say that this forces me to scrutinise and understand in much greater depth the buildings I paint, if simply because the process of recording them is that much more laborious than were I to use a camera.
I know there are photographers who spent a similar amount of time studying their subjects, too, but I think this is fairly uncommon.
I once heard an architecture lecturer state that the abandonment of drawing as a means of recording buildings of note by architeture students in favour of cameras had resulted in a loss of scrutiny on their part.