Speaking of Art Blog

Storm Over Taos, photograph

Yesterday something unexpected happened to me.  I won a Merit Award at a local all-media art competition in Chesterton IN for a framed photo of mine.  I also entered this pastel titled, Red Dress, but that’s not the one to receive an award.  Sometimes that happens.  I’ll enter two pieces into a show and the one that was sort of an afterthought is the one that gets singled out for an award.  I was surprised and also honored.

Red Dress, pastel

During the opening reception I was chatting with a few artist friends.  One of them commented that they thought the photo was stunning.  Then the question arose, “Have you considered painting that scene?”  My reply went something like this:

“No, I don’t think I’ll paint that particular scene.  It says everything I’d already want it to say.  My camera captured the whole look and feel of that moment.  My husband and I were on vacation in New Mexico and we were driving out of Taos as a storm was brewing in the distance.  We watched it form over the vast flat expanse outside of town.  Suddenly we both knew that we had to stop the car to witness Mother Nature’s gorgeous forces in action.  We sat silently entranced by the scene.  I shot several photos.  Then the clouds just as suddenly dissipated and the storm fell apart.  The drama was gone in a matter of seconds.  When I looked at my pics later that day, I knew in my bones that this one shot completely captured the incredible power in the sky that we had witnessed.  There was no way I could have improved upon that image with my pastels.  Sometimes the photo already says it all.  So, I enlarged it and put it in a frame.”

Lately I’ve been again hearing rumblings from artists with a looser style who are grousing on social media about how photorealistic artists should just, “Enlarge the photo and frame that.  Why bother copying the photo exactly?”  Well, here’s my response: We’re not.  Just because we choose to make a painting look like a photo, that doesn’t mean it looks exactly like any one particular photo.  It’s simply our chosen style.

Here’s an example of what I mean.  Last fall I was hiking through a prairie near our home.  The sun was shining on all the swishing/whispering grasses, there were lots of butterflies fluttering about, and the thistle flowers were huge and full.  I was taking pics left and right, gathering possible reference photos for future paintings.  While viewing the pics at home, I noticed one photo that had great potential.  But while it hinted at some of the elements that I was attracted to during my walk, it didn’t quite hit the mark.  I tried cropping the photo to see if that would help, but it still wasn’t there.  Then I knew it would make a good reference for a painting.  Why?  Because it wasn’t frame ready, but I knew what I had to do to reach my goal.

During my painting process I punched all the background colors, I heightened the sense of light filtering through the grasses at the top, I shortened the horizontal width gap between the left-hand grasses and the butterfly, and I gave the thistle flower some more color.  It was too chalky looking.  Ah, now my painting reflected what I saw and felt that day.  Is it photorealistic?  Yes, but it doesn’t match my reference photo exactly.  It matches what I experienced that day.  My reference photo was just a memory jogger, a starting point, same as how an artist with a looser style might use a reference photo.

The moral of my story is this: If my reference photo hits the mark, I don’t try to paint it.  I simply enlarge it, frame it, and sometimes even enter art competitions with it and win an award.  It already says it all.  But when a photo doesn’t quite hit the mark, that’s when I head for my easel to embellish the tale.  That’s when my creative juices start flowing and I’m off and running to try to recreate a special moment in time.  My photorealistic style is a whole separate matter.  In fact, I consider it a compliment when someone asks me, “Is that a photo or a painting, Mary Ann?  I can’t tell.”  That question is music to my ears.  And if someone thinks they’re looking at a photo of mine, well, maybe they are.  They’d better check the label on the wall and see if it says PHOTOGRAPHY or PASTEL.  It might be either one.

First Sign of Spring, pastel, 8x8"

This is my latest pastel, of a beautiful tiny wildflower called Hepatica, growing in the early springtime in northern Indiana.  I love seeing it push up through dirt and fallen leaves and sometimes even light snow.  It’s a visual promise of warmer weather and green growth to come.  One element of this flower that I find so attractive is its gorgeous coloring.  It has touches of blue-violet, violet, and red-violet in its tiny petals.

To begin the process of readying my pastel surface for painting, I printed my cropped reference photo on printing paper, making sure to resize the image to match my square window opening on my surface.  Then with a pencil I drew grid lines horizontally and vertically right on top of my photo.  I also drew tiny dots on my pastel surface where the grid lines intersect.  Those dots and the little grid marks along the outer edges of my pastel surface served as guidelines as I freehanded all the contour lines of the flowers onto my pastel surface with a charcoal pencil.

Then it was time to begin using my pastels.  For that task I always use my ipad mini set up next to my pastel surface at my easel, to display my reference photo.  I love how I can zoom in on tiny details as I work.  But here’s the interesting thing: Many times my ipad mini skews the colors in my reference photo such that everything is too blue.  It’s just how my device interprets the colors in a photo.  But I know they’re not that blue, so I keep my printed reference photo on hand too.  The printed photo is crappy for details, but its general colors are much truer to life.

So, my first bit of advice in this post is: COMPARE YOUR DEVICES FOR COLOR ACCURACY.  Go with the one that’s most accurate to what you remember of the scene.  It might turn out to be a combination of your devices, and that’s OK.  Then use both, or all three, whatever you’ve got.  It might be two devices like an ipad and a phone, and then a printed photo.  Just do some comparisons before you dive into the color and go with what matches most closely to the real deal.

Secondly, and this one is going to sound like a contradiction since I’m a photo realistic artist, at a certain point in the process of creating a painting, I find that my ipad mini gives me TMI.  Yes, you read that right, too much information.  Once I get rolling on a painting, my reference photo becomes less important and the scene in my mind’s eye takes on way more importance.  I know what I want my painting to look like and it’s not going to be a perfect match to my reference photo anymore.  It shouldn’t.  My artwork should stand alone as a new creation.  Yes, in my case it will still look photo realistic because that’s my chosen style, but it won’t match my reference photo in every picky detail.  So, at some point with every painting, I need to pay less attention to the details in my reference photo and more attention to the composition as a whole.  At that point, where do I look to take a quick glance at the big picture reference?  Not at my ipad mini.  I glance back at my crappy printed photo.  In fact, I turn my ipad mini off and I ONLY look at my crappy photo when I get near the end of the painting.  It’s all I need for squinting and seeing large shapes and shadows.  I’m definitely still working on details until the bitter end, but they are MY details, not the ones in the reference photo anymore.

One time many years ago when I was taking an art workshop, the instructor told all of us how to do exactly the same thing, but without using any kind of electronic device.  Part way through his painting he walked about 6 feet away from his easel, propped up his reference photo on a chair, and then went back to his easel and kept painting.  He was literally pulling the reference photo away just far enough from himself that it became impossible for him to see any of the photo’s details anymore.  Details in the reference photo had become superfluous.  He could still get as picky as he wanted with details in his painting, but they needed to come from what his painting needed, not what his reference photo dictated anymore.

So that’s how I use my reference photos while I’m creating something new at my easel.  I start with all the juicy details on my ipad mini, and then I resort to using a crappy, marked up printing paper near the end.  Sound crazy?  Don’t knock it ‘til you try it.  It’s what works best for me.