Paint #1, 2021
Paint #2, 2021
Paint #3, 2021
Paint #4, 2021
Paint #5, 2021
Paint #6, 2021
Paint #7, 2021
Paint #8, 2021
Paint #9, 2021
Paint #10, 2021
Paint #11, 2022
Paint #12, 2022
Paint #13, After Anthony Fisher's 2021 Painting "Some Will Still Be Standing", 2022
Paint #14, 2022
Paint
I have been a photographer all my life and I predict that I will be one until the end. I like the way the world looks photographed! I confess, however, that I have always been more than a little jealous of painters. When I visit museums, my eyes often take me first to the painting galleries. I marvel at the surfaces of paintings, which contain their own visual dramas, often independent of any narrative or formal aspect of the work. A difference between us photographers and painters are that photographers normally start with the world, while painters begin with a blank canvas and end up with astonishing creations. I still don’t understand how that happens! I often have dreams where I am a painter, creating gorgeous abstract works rivaling De Kooning, O’Keeffe, Pollock, Mitchell and Richter.
My “Paint Pictures” are my attempt to fill the gap between what I know (and adore) about photography, and what I long for in my other artistic fantasies and ambitions. I paint all my pictures using brushes, sticks and sponges. I feel insecure about calling myself a painter or even a Sunday painter but I do know enough about moving paint around to arrive at something interesting, maybe even beautiful!
Methods
To make some of my Paint pictures I use fast flash exposures to freeze the paint liquid. These photographs show that substance on its way to drying, a stage that finished paintings can never retain. I also use other lighting sources pointed in a low angle to exaggerate the raking light on the thick paint surface. Other times I shine light with strobes or flashlights toward small areas of the painting to vary the tonal range of the composition and suggest a moment of light happening on the surface. In some cases, the work is the outcome of my making multiple exposures which photographically blends a segment of one painted surface with a section of another, giving me unexpected results. I like the translucent and geometric visual marriages achieved with this method. Because what I am making are not “paintings” in their own right I’m able to crop discrete details of the larger painting to make them have a larger role in the final picture. The digital back of my camera has the capacity to render surfaces in highly detailed ways. This descriptive feature is important to me to have as I want to show paint in real and solid ways.
I should point out that in other work from the past I have used ink to make Cliche Verré pictures. I have also mixed in paint and clay to construct some of my Flowers for Lisa photographs. My images, that often give the appearance of being pure paintings, are really the product of events when photography and paint meet to form something different.